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They stopped and looked toward the source of the summons, but Phil, a shade the slower to return to his antagonist, saw out of the corner of his eye that Barwick was coming at him. He leaped back and with his arm knocked aside Barwick’s blow.

‘Holla, I say! Ha’ done, ha’ done! That, Barwick, was a foul trick. Another like that, and I ll turn you out.”

A crestfallen man was Barwick then, who made out to stammer, "Yea, Sir John — yea, Sir John, but a poacher —’e’s a poacher, Sir John, and a poacher —”

"A foul trick is a foul trick.”

The speaker wore a scarlet cloak overlaid with silver lace, and his iron-grey hair crept in curls from under a broad hat. His face, when he looked at Barwick, was such that Barwick stepped quietly back and held his tongue. The man had Martin by the collar (his sleek impudence had melted into a vast melancholy), and there stood behind them a little way up the bank, Phil now saw, a lady no older than Phil himself, who watched the group with calm, dark eyes and stood above them all like a queen.

"Throw down those knives,” the knight ordered, for it took no divining to perceive that here was Sir John Bristol in the flesh. "Thrust them, points into the ground. Good! Now have on, and God speed the better man.”

To Philip Marsham, who could have expected prison at the very least, this fair chance to fight his own battle came as a reprieve; and though he very well knew that he must win the fight at once or go down from sheer weakness and want of food, his eyes danced.

The knight’s frown darkened, observing that Bar-