though Chance
refused him any longer as her Knight, and the splintered end missed his
face by an inch or so.

He was on his feet in a moment, breathlessly scanning the onrushing
spider-webs. For a moment he was minded to run, and then thought of the
ravine, and turned back. He ran aside once to dodge one drifting terror,
and then he was swiftly clambering down the precipitous sides, and out
of the touch of the gale.

There under the lee of the dry torrent's steeper banks he might crouch,
and watch these strange, grey masses pass and pass in safety till the
wind fell, and it became possible to escape. And there for a long time
he crouched, watching the strange, grey, ragged masses trail their
streamers across his narrowed sky.

Once a stray spider fell into the ravine close beside him--a full foot
it measured from leg to leg, and its body was half a man's hand--and
after he had watched its monstrous alacrity of search and escape for a
little while, and tempted it to bite his broken sword, he lifted up his
iron-heeled boot and smashed it into a pulp. He swore as he did so, and
for a time sought up and down for another.

Then presently, when he was surer these spider swarms could not drop
into the ravine, he found a place where he could sit down, and sat and
fell into deep thought and began after his manner to gnaw his knuckles
and bite his nails. And from this he was moved by the coming of the man
with the white horse.

He heard him long before he saw him, as a clattering of hoofs, stumbling
footsteps, and a reassuring voice. Then the little man appeared, a
rueful figure, still with a tail of white cobweb trailing behind him.
They approached each other without speaking, without a salutation. The
little man was fatigued and shamed to the pitch of hopeless bitterness,
and came to a stop at last, face to face with his seated master. The
latter winced a little under his dependant's eye. "Well?" he said at
last, with no pretence of authority.

"You left him?"

"My horse bolted."

"I know. So did mine."

He laughed at his master mirthlessly.

"I say my horse bolted," said the man who once had a silver-studded
bridle.

"Cowards both," said the little man.

The other gnawed his knuckle through some meditative moments, with his
eye on his inferior.

"Don't call me a coward," he said at length.

"You are a coward like myself."

"A coward possibly. There is a limit beyond which every man must fear.
That I have