“Merlin, I know that tongue of yours.”
“Let us leave it to Dame Nature, Isoult. Love leaps in where he pleases.”
“I give you neither yea nor nay.”
“In that I must find my comfort.”
He sat awhile beside the fire, brooding and fingering his chin. Isoult had gone out into the orchard, but when he sought her there she was not to be found. Merlin crossed himself, and turned back towards the White Lodge.
“A woman’s anger is not to be trusted,” he said to himself, “for oftentimes it rises out of the passion it pretends to scorn. I must feel how that young man’s heart beats. Hot blood is very helpful.”
Isoult, hidden among some yew trees on the side of the hill above the orchard, watched Merlin’s grey frock disappear into the green of the woods. Her face shone white and hard, but in her eyes there was something of wonder, even of fear.
CHAPTER X
Fulk sat in the doorway of the hermit’s cell and watched the dusk come down—the slow, subtle dusk of a still May evening. The beech wood had been full of the singing of birds, and on the top of a holly near the quarry’s mouth a thrush had poured out all its joy and desire, its grey-brown breast turned towards the sunset. The beech foliage had changed from vivid green to amethyst, the trunks from grey to black, while orange, amber, and saffron were flung abroad across an exultant west. Now, later still, the woods rose in soft, rounded blackness against a deep blue sky, with the crescent of the moon clear as polished steel.
Fulk sat there brooding, his face growing grey in the dusk. The smoke of a fire rose beyond the mouth of the quarry—a grey, sinuous pillar that swayed slightly from side to side or thrust out a ghostly arm when some breath of wind played upon it. Now and again a voice growled sulkily, but since the birds had ceased their singing the silence had become immense, irrefutable, supreme.