The girl blushed, and nearly stammered.
“I am unscathed,” she hastened to say, “thanks to heaven. I am safe and whole as if I had spent the day in a convent cell. My name is Igraine, if you would know it. I fear I have told you heavy tidings.”
The man turned his face to the sky like one who looks into other worlds.
“It is nothing,” he said, gazing into the night; “nothing but what we must look for in these stark days. Our altars smoke, our blood is spilt, and yet we still pray. Yet may I be cursed, and cursed again, if I do not dye my sword for this.”
There was a sudden bleak fierceness in his voice that betrayed his fibre and the strong thoughts that were stirring in his heart that moment. His face looked almost fanatical in the cold gloom, gaunt, heavy-jawed, lion-like. Igraine watched this thunder-cloud of thought and passion in silence, thinking she would meet the man in the wrack of life rather as friend than as foe. The brief mood seemed to pass, or at least to lose expression. Again, there was that in the kindness of his face that made the girl feel beneath the eye of a brother.
“You will ride with me?” he asked.
Igraine hesitated a moment.
“I was for Anderida,” she said, “and it is only three leagues distant. Now that I am free I can go through the wold alone, for I am no child.”
“An insult to my manhood,” said the stranger.