He pondered those words of hers all day.
Dusk was falling before she returned. The brown horse’s ears hung limp, as though she had ridden him many miles, and his coat was stained with sweat. Martin Valliant had been standing in the doorway of his cell. He went forward to hold her horse.
“I so managed it that I lost myself,” she said.
Her face looked white in the dusk, and her eyes tired.
“I reached a river, a fine stream.”
“The Rondel. It runs a league away, and the woods are great and very thick.”
“That lured me on—perhaps. I found a ford, and pushed my horse over, there are wild grasslands beyond all full of flowers.”
“I have never been so far,” he confessed.
“It is a great country, even wilder than my own. I saw as splendid a hart as ever swam a stream come down and cross the river. And now I am as hungry as though I had followed the hounds.”
He saw that she was weary.