"Sometimes--a woman."
Balthasar, looking slantwise under half-closed lids, saw her eyes flash and her lips tighten.
"Which way?"
"The southern ride, towards Gilderoy."
Duessa shook her bridle, and threw one look into Balthasar's eyes.
"Remember," she said, "remember, a woman loves a friend, a true friend, who can tell a lie, or keep a secret."
Balthasar watched her ride away. He stood and smiled to himself, while his long fingers played with the folds of his mantle. Red wine was bounding in his blood, and his imagination revelled. He was a poetic person, and a poet's soul is often like tinder, safe enough till the spark falls.
"Gloria," he said to himself with a smirk, "here's hunting with a vengeance. Two women and a man! The devil is loose. Soul of Masaccio, that woman has fine eyes."
That day, when the sky was growing red over the woods, Flavian and his troop drew close on the heels of Yeoland and the harper. The man, for all his heat, had kept his horse-flesh well in hand. Once out of Cambremont wood, they had met a charcoal-burner, who had seen Yeoland and her follower pass towards the west. They had hunted fast over fell and moor. While not two miles behind came Duessa of the Black Hair, biting her lips and giving her brute lash and spur with a woman's viciousness.
Yeoland, halting on a slope above the pine woods, looked back and saw something that made her crane her neck and wax vigilant. Out of the wine-red east and the twilight gloom came the lightning of harness, the galloping gleam of armed men. Jaspar's blear eyes were unequal to the girl's. The men below were riding hard, half under the lea of the midnight pines, whose tops touched the sunset. A half-moon of steel, their crescent closed wood and moor. They had the lead in the west; they were mounting the slope behind.