Then was it to him at first as if a sweet dream had come across
the void of his gloom, and then at last the gloom and the dread
and the deadness left him, and he knew that his friend and fellow
was talking to him, and that he sat by her knee to knee,
and the sweetness of her savoured in his nostrils as she leaned
her face toward him, and he knew himself for what he was;
and yet for memory of that past horror, and the sweetness of his
friend and what not else, he fell a-weeping. But Ursula bestirred
herself and brought out food from her wallet, and sat down beside
him again, and he wiped the tears from his eyes and laughed,
and chid himself for being as a child in the dark, and then they
ate and drank together in that dusk nook of the wilderness.
And now was he happy and his tongue was loosed, and he fell to telling
her many things of Upmeads, and of the tale of his forefathers,
and of his old loves and his friends, till life and death seemed to him
as they had seemed of time past in the merry land of his birth.
So there anon they fell asleep for weariness, and no dreams
of terror beset their slumbers.
CHAPTER 11
They Come to the Vale of Sweet Chestnuts
When they went on their way next morning they found little change in the pass,
and they rode the dread highway daylong, and it was still the same:
so they rested a little before nightfall at a place where there was
water running out of the rocks, but naught else for their avail.
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