“Shall I tell you?”
“Yes.”
And he gave her the tale without affectation and without reserve.
Tiphaïne was silent when he had ended, watching the winding woodways of the forest. She was thinking of her brother Robin, and how Tinteniac’s trial compared with his. The one man had failed in the ordeal, the other risen to greater strength above the sense of his own self-shame.
“It was, then, your mother, sire?” she said, at last.
“Yes, my mother who saved me—”
“I can understand.”
“That a man would be a miserable rat who would play the coward under his mother’s eyes.”
Tiphaïne’s silence showed that she was thinking.
“And Robin had no mother, sire,” she said; “if I had been wiser—”