“And re-open thy wound, messire?  Nay, let be—­I ride easily thus.”

“Art angered with me, Fidelis?”

“Nay, lord, I do but pity thee!”

“And wherefore?”

“For thy so great loneliness—­in all thy world is none but Beltane, and he is very woeful and dreameth ever of his wrongs—­”

“Would’st call me selfish again, forsooth?”

“Nay, lord—­a martyr.  O, a very martyr that huggeth his chains and kisseth his wounds and joyeth in the recollection of his pain.”

“Have I not suffered, Fidelis?”

“Thou hast known the jangling gloom of a dungeon—­’twas at Garthlaxton Keep, methinks?”

“Fetters!” cried Beltane, “a dungeon!  These be things to smile at—­my grief is of the mind—­the deeper woe of high and noble ideals shattered—­a holy altar blackened and profaned—­a woman worshipped as divine, and proved baser than the basest!”

“And is this all, my lord?”

“All!” quoth Beltane amazed.  “All!” saith he, turning to stare.

“So much of woe and tribulation for so little reason?  Nay, hear me, for now will I make thee a prophecy, as thus:  There shall dawn a day, lord Beltane, when thou shalt see at last and know Truth when she stands before thee.  And, in that day thou shalt behold all things with new eyes:  and in that day shalt thou sigh, and long, and yearn with all thy soul for these woeful hours wherein Self looms for thee so large thou art blind to aught else.”

“Good Fidelis, thy prophecy is beyond my understanding.”

“Aye, my lord, ’tis so I think, indeed!”

“Pray thee therefore rede and expound it unto me!”

“Nay, time mayhap shall teach it thee, and thou, methinks shalt passionately desire again the solitude of this wilderness.”

“Aye, but wherefore?”

“For that it shall be beyond thy reach—­and mine!” and Fidelis sighed in deep and troubled fashion and so fell to silence, what time Beltane, cunning in wood-lore, glancing hither and thither at knotted branch and writhen tree bole, viewing earth and heaven with a forester’s quick eye, rode on into the trackless wilds of the forest-lands.

Now here, thinketh the historian, it booteth not to tell of all those minor haps and chances that befell them; how, despite all Beltane’s wood-craft, they went astray full oft by reason of fordless rivers and quaking swamps:  of how they snared game to their sustenance, or how, for all the care and skill of Sir Fidelis, Beltane’s wound healed not, by reason of continual riding, for that each day he grew more restless and eager for knowledge of Belsaye, so that, because of his wound he knew small rest by day and a fevered sleep by night—­yet, despite all, his love for Fidelis daily waxed and grew, what time he pressed on through the wild country, north-westerly.

Five weary days and nights wandered they, lost to sight and knowledge within the wild; days of heat and nights of pain and travail, until there came an evening when, racked with anguish and faint with thirst and weariness, Beltane drew rein within a place of rocks whereby was a shady pool deep-bowered in trees.  Down sprang Fidelis to look anxiously on Beltane’s face, pale and haggard in the light of a great moon.