She had wandered here one day and had settled herself on the grassy slope of the grave. The ribbon of her lute lay over her shoulder. A breeze sang fitfully through the branches, and a golden haze shimmered down as from the clerestory windows of a cathedral. Her lute seemed sad when it made answer to her fingers. Thought was plaintive and not devotional, if one might judge by the mood of the music, and the notes were wayward and pathetically void of discipline.
It was while the girl thrummed idly at the strings that a vague sound floated down to her with the momentary emphasis born of a fickle wind. It was foreign to the forest, or it would not have roused her as it did. As she listened the sound came again from the west. It was neither the distant bay of a hound nor a horn’s solitary note. There was something metallic about it, something musical. When it disappeared, she listened for its recurrence; when she heard it again, she puzzled over its nature.
The sound grew clearer at gradual intervals, and then ceased utterly. The girl listened for a long while to no purpose, and then prepared to forget the incident. The decision was premature. She was startled anon by the sound breaking out at no great distance. There was no doubt as to its nature: it was the clanging of a bell.
Yeoland wondered who could be carrying such a thing in such a place. Possibly some of Fulviac’s men were coming home with stolen cattle, and an old bell-wether from some wild moorland with them.
The sound of the bell came very near; it seemed close amid the circling ranks of pines. Twigs were cracking too, and she heard the beat of approaching footsteps. Then her glance caught something visible, a streak of white in the shadows, moving like a ghost. The thing went amid the trees with the bell mute. The girl’s doubts were soon set at rest as to whether she had been seen or no. The figure in grey slipped between the pines, and came out into the grass circle about the grave, cowled, masked, bell at girdle, a leper.
The girl stared at it with a cold flutter at her heart. The thing stood under the boughs motionless as stone. The bell gave never a tinkle; a white chin poked forward from under the hood; the masked face was in shadow. Then the bell jangled, and a gruff voice came from the cowl.