ho makes the coil about nothing now?" inquired Gerard composedly.

Denys's reply was a very indirect one.

"Be pleased to note," said he, "that I have a bad heart. You were man
enough to save my life, yet I must sneer at you, a novice in war. Was
not I a novice once myself? Then you fainted from a wound, and I thought
you swooned for fear, and called you a milksop. Briefly, I have a bad
tongue and a bad heart."

"Denys!"

"Plait-il?"

"You lie."

"You are very good to say so, little one, and I am eternally obliged to
you," mumbled the remorseful Denys.

Ere they had walked many furlongs, the muscles of the wounded leg
contracted and stiffened, till presently Gerard could only just put his
toe to the ground, and that with great pain.

At last he could bear it no longer.

"Let me lie down and die," he groaned, "for this is intolerable."

Denys represented that it was afternoon, and the nights were now frosty;
and cold and hunger ill companions; and that it would be unreasonable
to lose heart, a certain great personage being notoriously defunct. So
Gerard leaned upon his axe, and hobbled on; but presently he gave in,
all of a sudden, and sank helpless in the road.

Denys drew him aside into the wood, and to his surprise gave him his
crossbow and bolts, enjoining him strictly to lie quiet, and if any
ill-looking fellows should find him out and come to him, to bid them
keep aloof; and should they refuse, to shoot them dead at twenty paces.
"Honest men keep the path; and, knaves in a wood, none but fools do
parley with them." With this he snatched up Gerard's axe, and set off
running--not, as Gerard expected, towards Dusseldorf, but on the road
they had come.

Gerard lay aching and smarting; and to him Rome, that seemed so near at
starting, looked far, far off, now that he was two hundred miles nearer
it. But soon all his thoughts turned Sevenbergen-wards. How sweet it
would be one day to hold Margaret's hand, and tell her all he had gone
through for her! The very thought of it, and her, soothed him; and in
the midst of pain and irritation of the nerves be lay resigned, and
sweetly, though faintly, smiling.

He had lain thus more than two hours, when suddenly there were shouts;
and the next moment something struck a tree hard by, and quivered in it.

He looked, it was an arrow.

He started to his feet. Several missiles rattled among the boughs, and
the wood echoed with battle-cries. Whence they came he coul