The third line of Fellowship with Men abandons the calm imagery of gate and clan for something closer to open rivalry. Legge's translation describes weapons concealed in a thicket and a watcher climbing the high hill above it, waiting through three years in which nothing moves. Where the first two lines pictured fellowship sought or withheld, the third line pictures fellowship actively contested, one party armed and hidden, suspicious of a rival it dares not confront directly, and paralyzed by that suspicion for a span of time the text stretches to three full years.
This is the topmost line of the lower trigram Li, the last position before the hexagram crosses into Heaven above, and Chinese commentary consistently treats such threshold lines as unsettled, belonging fully to neither the trigram beneath nor the one still to come. Read against the second line's danger of narrow fellowship, the third line shows what happens when that narrowing curdles further still into open contest: two parties, likely both seeking the same central alliance, at a standoff neither can resolve through hiding and watching alone.
The line offers no verdict of good or ill fortune, only the description of the standoff itself, and later readers take that omission as its own meaning: a fellowship contested by concealment and suspicion produces nothing, neither victory nor peace, only three years spent in a thicket watching a hill that never yields an outcome.