When Tristan came back, broken by the heat, the Queen said

“Friend, where have you been?”

“Hunting a hart,” he said, “that wearied me.  I would lie down and sleep.”

So she lay down, and he, and between them Tristan put his naked sword, and on the Queen’s finger was that ring of gold with emeralds set therein, which Mark had given her on her bridal day; but her hand was so wasted that the ring hardly held.  And no wind blew, and no leaves stirred, but through a crevice in the branches a sunbeam fell upon the face of Iseult and it shone white like ice.  Now a woodman found in the wood a place where the leaves were crushed, where the lovers had halted and slept, and he followed their track and found the hut, and saw them sleeping and fled off, fearing the terrible awakening of that lord.  He fled to Tintagel, and going up the stairs of the palace, found the King as he held his pleas in hall amid the vassals assembled.

“Friend,” said the King, “what came you hither to seek in haste and breathless, like a huntsman that has followed the dogs afoot?  Have you some wrong to right, or has any man driven you?”

But the woodman took him aside and said low down: 

“I have seen the Queen and Tristan, and I feared and fled.”

“Where saw you them?”

“In a hut in Morois, they slept side by side.  Come swiftly and take your vengeance.”

“Go,” said the King, “and await me at the forest edge where the red cross stands, and tell no man what you have seen.  You shall have gold and silver at your will.”

The King had saddled his horse and girt his sword and left the city alone, and as he rode alone he minded him of the night when he had seen Tristan under the great pine-tree, and Iseult with her clear face, and he thought: 

“If I find them I will avenge this awful wrong.”

At the foot of the red cross he came to the woodman and said: 

“Go first, and lead me straight and quickly.”

The dark shade of the great trees wrapt them round, and as the King followed the spy he felt his sword, and trusted it for the great blows it had struck of old; and surely had Tristan wakened, one of the two had stayed there dead.  Then the woodman said: 

“King, we are near.”

He held the stirrup, and tied the rein to a green apple-tree, and saw in a sunlit glade the hut with its flowers and leaves.  Then the King cast his cloak with its fine buckle of gold and drew his sword from its sheath and said again in his heart that they or he should die.  And he signed to the woodman to be gone.

He came alone into the hut, sword bare, and watched them as they lay:  but he saw that they were apart, and he wondered because between them was the naked blade.

Then he said to himself:  “My God, I may not kill them.  For all the time they have lived together in this wood, these two lovers, yet is the sword here between them, and throughout Christendom men know that sign.  Therefore I will not slay, for that would be treason and wrong, but I will do so that when they wake they may know that I found them here, asleep, and spared them and that God had pity on them both.”