to save you,' he said. 'Let me hear about it, as,
being prisoners, we may never come off.'

'You!' she cried out. 'You who stole my wedding portion!'

He laughed deviously.

'Why, I have laid it up so well for you that you may wed a knight now if
you do my bidding. I was ever against your wedding Hall.'

'You lie!' she said. 'You gar'd me do it.'

The maids were peeping out of the cellar, whither they had fled.

'Come upon the grass,' he said. 'I will not be heard to say more than
this: that you and I stand and fall together like good sister and goodly
brother.'

Their faces differed only in that hers was afraid and his smiling as he
thought of new lies to tell her. Her face in her hood, pale beneath its
weathering, approached the colour of his that shewed the pink and white
of indoors. She came very slowly near him, for she was dazed. But when
she was almost at the sill he caught her hand and drew it beneath his
elbow.

'Tell me truly,' she said, 'shall I see the Court or a prison?... But
you cannot speak truth, nor ever could when we were tiny twins. God help
me: last Sunday I had the mind to wed my yard-man. I would become such a
liar as thou to come away from here.'

'Sister,' he said, 'this I tell you most truly: that this shall fall out
according as you obey me and inform me'; and, because he was a little
the taller, he leaned over her as they walked away together.

* * * * *

On the fourth day from then they were come to the great wood that is to
south and east of the castle of Pontefract. Here Lascelles, who had
ridden much with his sister, forsook her and went ahead of the slow and
heavy horses of that troop of men. The road was broadened out to forty
yards of green turf between the trees, for this was a precaution against
ambushes of robbers. Across the road, after he had ridden alone for an
hour and a half, there was a guard of four men placed. And here, whilst
he searched for his pass to come within the limits of the Court, he
asked what news, and where the King was.

It was told him that the King lay still at the Fivefold Vents, two days'
progress from the castle, and as it chanced that a verderer's pricker
came out of the wood where he had been to mark where the deer lay for
to-morrow's killing, Lascelles bade this man come along with him for a
guide.

'Sir, ye cannot miss the way,' the pricker said surlily. 'I have my deer
to watch.'

'I will have you to g