returned Sir Gavan. "Tennant, with a dozen men,
is now beating the upper plantations."

Constans thought guiltily of that cleverly concealed gap in the
palisades just beyond the intake of the Ochre brook. He and Issa had
shared it between them as a precious secret, and he had used it this
very morning as a short cut to the water-side. Tennant, their elder
brother, was not aware of its existence, but then Tennant was a prig,
and not to be trusted in truly momentous affairs.

There was his father's wrath. Constans turned sick at the thought of
arousing it. No; he could not tell him.

"I don't know," he said, vaguely.

Sir Gavan looked at him searchingly, then turned and strode out of the
room.

Constans felt his cheeks grow hot. Why had he not told all the truth?
He was a coward, a liar, in all but the actual word. He sat down on a
bench and buried his face in his hands; then the recurring thought of
Issa and of her peril stung him to his feet. Where had Sir Gavan gone?

Constans made his way, hesitatingly, into the court-yard of the keep. He
found it thronged with men, his father's retainers and servants. The
archers were busy putting new strings to their bows; the spearmen were
testing, with grave eagerness, the stout ash of their weapons, or
perchance whetting an edge on the broad blades. Half a dozen of the
younger men were engaged in covering the roof of the main and out
buildings with horse-hides soaked in water, as a protection against
burning arrows; others were driving the protesting cattle into the byres
and sacking up a quantity of newly threshed grain that lay upon the
flailing floor; everywhere the noise of shouting men and of hurrying
feet.

Sir Gavan was not to be seen, and Constans, after inquiring for him
through a fruitless quarter of an hour, entered the main house and
sought the fighting platform on its roof. Why had no lookout been
stationed here? Surely an oversight. He gazed eagerly about him.

Directly to the right of the house lay the home paddock, stretching away
some two hundred yards to the edge of a white-birch plantation. The
Ochre brook bounded it on one side, and the current had scoured out for
itself an ever-deepening channel in the soft, alluvial soil. A clump of
alders, just bursting into leaf, masked the bed of the stream at one
particular point, where the bank rose into a miniature bluff. Constans,
from his elevated position, was enabled to overlook this point, and so
to mak