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“Lean on me.”

He looked at her half rebelliously, and then hung his head, and obeyed.

How great his need was became apparent before they had reached the clearing amid the beech trees. The man stumbled and faltered at every step, his head fell forward, he muttered incoherently, like one in the heat of a fever. Denise felt his weight bearing more heavily upon her arm. His head drooped, and rested upon her shoulder. Before they reached the wattle gate of the garden the conscious life was out of him, and Denise, borne down like a vine-ladened sapling bent by the wind, let the man slip from her gently to the ground.

She stood irresolute a moment, then stooping and putting her two hands under his shoulders, she found that she could drag him slowly up the stone path into her cell. Once within she closed the door, and slipping off her cloak, she covered the slit of a window with it. There was a little earthen lamp in the cell, and Denise sought and found it in the darkness, also tinder, flint, and steel. Yet her hands shook so with her labour of bearing up under Aymery’s weight, that it was a minute or more before she had the lamp burning.