to wake.

She sprang up with a start, but seeing the Hermit's gown and staff,
and his face above her, lay quiet and said to him: "I have watered
your garden daily in return for the beans and oil that I took from
your store."

"Who are you, and how do you come here?" asked the Hermit.

She said: "I am a wild woman and live in the woods."

And when he pressed her again to tell him why she had sought shelter
in his cave, she said that the land to the south, whence she came,
was full of armed companies and bands of marauders, and that great
license and bloodshed prevailed there; and this the Hermit knew to
be true, for he had heard of it on his homeward journey. The Wild
Woman went on to tell him that she had been hunted through the woods
like an animal by a band of drunken men-at-arms, Lansknechts from
the north by their barbarous dress and speech, and at length,
starving and spent, had come on his cave and hidden herself from her
pursuers. "For," she said, "I fear neither wild beasts nor the
woodland people, charcoal burners, Egyptians, wandering minstrels or
chapmen; even the highway robbers do not touch me, because I am poor
and brown; but these armed men flown with blood and wine are more
terrible than wolves and tigers."

And the Hermit's heart melted, for he thought of his little sister
lying with her throat slit across the altar steps, and of the scenes
of blood and rapine from which he had fled away into the wilderness.
So he said to the stranger that it was not meet he should house her