class="pindent">“So have better men before now—and repented of it.”

He was challenged, despite his boyish shrewdness, by a laughing audacity in the woman’s voice. Her meek mood was no more than spilt milk. She walked beside him with a swinging motion and an air of provocative insolence, and though her face was a mere grey blur he could imagine a curling of the lips and a gleaming of the eyes.

“I have said nay. Let it stand. As a matter of gossip I’ll ask you why I should let you go?”

“Only a fool would ask that!”

“Dub me a fool.”

“Because I am a woman—and I ask it.”

He laughed ironically, not looking at her but away over the heath.

“Put that in your girdle with your knife. A woman is no more than a man to me when I cherish the deer.”

She swung closer, and her voice changed to a mischievous, pleading whisper.

“Ah, but Messire Fulk, listen a moment.”

“You may find the verderers more easily cozened when the swainmote meets.”

“Good sir, how young you are!”

“Younger than an old fool, perhaps.”

“Be careful. It is the young fools who boast.”

She became ominously mute and docile of a sudden, and, turning from him, walked out slowly from under the shadow of the yews. Fulk went with her, step for step. She paused where the heathland began, and even as she paused the moon began to disappear behind a black drift of clouds.

“Wretch—traitor moon! Look!”

Fulk looked at the sky when she had meant him to look at her.

“What’s amiss with the moon?”

She gave him a significant side-glance, lids half closed, eyes glimmering.

“It is so dark again. Ah, Messire Fulk, you may not see me until to-morrow.”

“There is light enough for me to see you safe to the White Lodge.”

“Only the shadow of me. Look, now, am I young or old? Oh, come, be gallant!”

He stalked along beside her, lean, powerful, agile, old for his age, which was two-and-twenty, very sure of himself, and more than a little mistrustful of women. A vast silence possessed the night, save for the occasional rustling of the wind in the withered fern. The horizon was the edge of an upturned silver bowl powdered with faint stars. Scattered clouds drifted. Down in the bottoms white mists had gathered, and the woods looked black and cold, and grim. Westwards, about a furlong away, the Ghost Oak stood out on the ridge of a hill, showing like the antlered head of some huge hart.

If he had any curiosity as to his companion’s age, looks, name, and degree, Fulk hid that curiosity very creditably. Her voice was neither the voice of an old woman nor of a mere strolling wench, and he noticed that she was slim, and that she held herself like a young girl who had never laboured nor carried burdens nor borne a child. But his hardihood did not flatter her by betraying any consciousness of the eternal mystery of the creature that walked at his side.

She gave a shrug of piqued resignation.

“How monstrous solemn for one so young! Good Master Fulk, you take life and yourself and the deer most seriously. Now, supposing you catechise me. Who am I? Whence have I come? Whither shall I go? Or am I a mere she-ass to be led at the end of a rope?”

His face remained a profile to her.

“Who are you?”

“Ah—we advance! I am neither an abbess nor a great lady, nor a dragonfly nor a windhover. I am something of everything. I can shoot with the bow, dance, sing, play the lute, stab a man for insolence, tell lies, laugh, run like a boy. Guess!”

“I am not good at guessing. Tell the plain truth, or wait till the morning.”

She looked at him, and then at the sky where the edge of the moon was swimming clear of a cloud. She smiled to herself, and then touched Fulk’s elbow.

“See, the moon is coming out. You can see the shine in my eyes.”

Pausing abruptly, she put her hood well back, and stood as though determined to provoke him into taking her challenge. Fulk swung round as the moon cleared the cloud, and saw her white face claiming him as a regarder. Her hair, black as charcoal, was fastened up in a net of some silvery stuff that shone like gossamer on a hedgerow. It was a face of ivory—clear, keen, with eyes that glimmered under straight, black eyebrows. The mouth was long, mobile, audacious. The nose, slightly curved at the bridge, had proud, fine-spirited nostrils. It was a face that could be fierce, contemptuous, yet passionately eager, heroic, wicked, adorable by turns. She held herself as though she could hold the whole world at her service, and had never found herself in a mood to be mastered by any man.

Fulk stared—beyond his expectations. Something flashed a subtle provocation before him, menacingly, temptingly. The chin in air was railing and audacious. The dark eyes glittered at his grave face.

“Am I young or old?”

“I can see no wrinkles by this light.”

“Fair to behold and beholden to no man. I have made fools of them by the score—yes, I! Isoult of the Rose. I go where I please and when I please, and no man has my heart. I am desired—and I desire not. I ask, and am obeyed. Go to, now; you will grant me my desire?”

“To go where you please?”

“Even so.”

He looked at her steadily, as though holding his manhood to the flame of her audacious comeliness.

“It is to be where—I please.”

“So you say.”

“And so I mean.”

Her eyes pressed his as one sword presses on another.

“So! The boy is not to be cozened?”

“I have been very patient.”

“Patient! Honey and wine—patient! Jack Frost in doublet and hose!”

She laughed, scanned his face with some quickening of her audacity, and drew her hood forward again, consenting to realise that he would abide by his words. Her resignation was frank and confident, the resignation of a fearless spirit whose blood flowed too hotly for little malicious and peevish impulses to live in it. She had a shrewd instinct for the worth of a man’s word, seeing that life and her own heart had taught her the saying, “There is no man whom I cannot fool.”

“Let us see the White Lodge, Messire Fulk. I am growing hungry.”

She caught the rapid side-glance he gave her as they moved on together over the heath. Her sudden surrender had made him suspicious, so that he held his head high and nosed the air like a stag to get wind of an ambuscado.

“I play fair,” she said; “the game is yours—to-night.”

His eyes were sweeping the heath.

“There may be more than one jay in the wood.”

“There was but one to-night; but to-morrow, or the next day——”

She broke off with suggestive abruptness, and walked on at his side with a casual complaisance, holding her head high, and watching him at her leisure. She marked the set of his shoulders, and the way he carried his head, as though he lived a hawk’s life, looking ever into the distance, alert, part of the wild. He swung along with sweeping strides, the action of a man who could run like a deer, not the