loved it the more for the speed and strength and cunning
with which it defied him. It had a secret lair he could never discover;
but one day that secret too should be his own. Meanwhile his blood was
heated, and the Red Hunter dreamed of the hart and of one other thing.

And while he dreamed Proud Rosalind grew glad and strong on her
miraculous dole of money, that was always to her hand when she had need
of it. Fear went out of her life, for she knew certainly now that she
was in the keeping of unseen powers, and would not lack again. And
little by little she too began to build a dream out of her pride; for
she thought, I am all my fathers' house, and there will be no honor to
it more except that which can come through me. And whenever tales went
about of the fame of the fair young Queen of Bramber Castle, and the
crowning of her name in this tourney and in that, or of the great lords
and princes that would have died for one smile of her (yet her smiles
came easily, and her kisses too, men said), Rosalind knit her brows,
and her longing grew a little stronger, and she thought: If arrows and
steel might once flash lightnings about my father's daughter, and
cleave the shadows that have hung their webs about my fathers' hearth!

She now began to put by a little hoard of pennies, for she meant to buy
flax to spin the finest of linen for her body, and purple for sleeves
for her arms, and scarlet leather for shoes for her feet, and gold for
a fillet for her head; and so, attired at last as became her birth, one
day to attend a tourney where perhaps some knight would fight his
battle in her name. And she had no other thought in this than glory to
her dead race. But her precious store mounted slowly; and she had laid
by nothing but the money for the fine linen for her robe, when a thing
happened that shattered her last foothold among men.

For suddenly all the countryside was alive with a strange rumor. Some
one had seen a hart upon the hills, a hart of twelve points, fit for
royal hunting. Kings will hunt no lesser game than this. But this of
all harts was surely born to be hunted only by a maiden queen, for,
said the rumor, it was as white as snow. Such a hart had never before
been heard of, and at first the tale of it was not believed. But the
tale was repeated from mouth to mouth until at last all men swore to it
and all winds carried it; and amongst others some wind of the Downs
bore it across the land from Arun to Adur,