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Denise did not close her eyes that night. She was wakeful, strangely wakeful, almost conscious of the beating of her heart. More than once she had bent forward and touched Aymery’s hand, and its coldness chilled her, so that she longed for the day. Often too in the strained suspense of the night’s silence she would fancy that he had ceased to breathe, and she would fall a-praying with a passion that startled even her own heart.

A faint greyness beneath the door, a sudden tentative cry from some awakened bird. For a while silence, then sudden and strange, a thrilling up of note on note, a sense as of golden light mounting in sweeping spirals towards the sky. Wizard’s magic in the grey of the great wood, a thousand throats throbbing in unison till the whole world seemed full of a glory of sound. The very air quivered within the cell. It was as though invisible wings were beating everywhere, while the trees of the forest were tongued with prophetic fire.

Denise rose, opened wide the door, and let the song of the birds come to her with the cold fragrance of the breaking day. As yet greyness everywhere, grey grass, grey trees. A gradual gathering of light, then, of a sudden, as though some god had hurled fire into the sky, a blur of gold, a cry of crimson from the mouths of the pale clouds. Soon, an arch of amber in the east, the forest black against the splendour thereof, the grass a-gleam, the sky in the zenith still dim like a woman’s eyes dim with tears. A beautiful tenderness transfigured the face of the world; no wicked thing seemed thinkable while those birds were singing.