nd he did not mean to leave
with his task unfulfilled.

Perhaps John could have found no fitter emissary than this Gascon lad,
with his simple forest training, his quick sympathy and keen
intelligence, and his thorough knowledge of the details of peasant life,
which in all countries possess many features in common.

It was hard at first to get the old man to care to understand what was
said, or to take the trouble to reply. The habit of silence is one of
the most difficult to break; but patience and perseverance generally win
the day: and when it dawned upon this strange old man that it was of
himself and his own loss and grief that these youths had come to speak,
a new look crossed his weatherbeaten face, and a strange gleam of
mingled fury and despair shone in the depths of his hollow eyes.

"My sorrow!" he exclaimed, in a voice from which the dreary cadence had
now given place to a clearer, firmer ring: "is it of that you ask, young
sirs? Has it been told to you the cruel wrong that I have suffered?"

Then suddenly clinching his right hand and shaking it wildly above his
head, he broke into vehement and almost unintelligible invective,
railing with frenzied bitterness against some foe, speaking so rapidly,
and with such strange inflections of voice, that it was but a few words
that the brothers could distinguish out of the whole of the impassioned
speech. One of those words was "my son -- my boy," followed by the names
of Sanghurst and Basildene.

It was these names that arrested the attention of the brothers, causing
them to start and exchange quick glances. Raymond waited till the old
man had finished his railing, and then he asked gently:

"Had you then a son? Where is he now?"

"A son! ay, that had I -- the light and brightness of my life!" cried
the old man, with a sudden burst of rude eloquence that showed him to
have been at some former time something better than his present
circumstances seemed to indicate. "Young sirs, I know not who you are; I
know not why you ask me of my boy. But your faces are kind, and
perchance there may be help in the world, though I have found it not. I
know not how time has fled since that terrible sorrow fell upon me.
Perchance not many years by the calendar, but in misery and suffering a
lifetime. Listen, and I will tell you all. I was not ever as you see me
now. I was no lonely woodman buried in the heart of the forest. I was
second huntsman to Sir Hugh Vavasour of Woodcry