“There is the beech wood yonder, and out of it will come a dragon, and I shall have no sword!”
“No sword could help you.”
His stare was long and shrewd.
“It may be that Isoult of the Rose will ride on the dragon’s back!”
“If so, I shall be the master,” she said, looking at his hands.
Betimes she left him, and whither she went he knew not, save that she passed away into the beech wood, carrying his sword.
The next morning she came again, and her mood was full of laughter and of the joy of living. She had broken off a white may bough and carried it on her shoulder, and as she came through the woods Fulk heard her singing.
He would not suffer himself to believe that he had looked for her coming, or that her red mouth and her mysterious eyes had any message to move him. Yet that his manhood should leap in him when he saw her among the beech trees in her green cloak and blue cote-hardie, and with the white may bough over her shoulder, was a challenge to his pride. She brought some of the exultant rush of the year with her in the way she walked and the way she carried her head.
“I have come five miles.”
Life was at high noon in her, with a glow of the eyes and face. Fulk took some of the dry bracken and spread it upon the stone bench, and the casual haughtiness of the deed was a part of the morning’s comedy.