e, and like a man that has been strangely scared, looking behind
him as though he expected to be followed by something; and from that
day he kept his chamber, and would not go abroad, or if he went out,
he went fearfully, looking about him; and the English men-at-arms came
to the valley, but the knight that had ever been foremost in the fight
would not ride out to meet them, but kept his bed. The manor lay off
the road, and he ordered a boy to lie in the copse beside the way, and
to come up to the house to tell him if any soldiers went by. But a
troop of horse came secretly over the hill; and seeing the place lie
so solitary and deserted, and being in haste, they came not in, but
one of them shot a bolt at a venture; but the knight, it seemed, must
have stolen from his bed, and have been peeping through the shutters;
for the knight's lady who sate below in sore shame and grief for her
husband's cowardice, heard a cry, and coming up found him in his
bedgown lying by the window, and a bolt sticking in his brain.

Her grief and misery were so sore at this, that she was for a time
nearly mad; they buried the knight in secret in the churchyard; but
the lady sate for many days speaking to no one, beating with her hand
upon the table and eating little.

One day it seems that she had the thought to go herself to the Hill
of Trouble, so she robed herself in haste, and went at early dawn; she
went in secret, and came back at noon, smiling to herself, with all
her grief gone; and she sate for three days thus with her hands
folded, and from her face it was plain that there was joy in her
heart; and on the third evening they found her cold and stiff in her
chair, dead an hour since, but she was still smiling. And the lands
passed to a distant kinsman. And since that day, said the old man, no
one had ever set foot on the Hill, except a child not long since that
strayed thither, and came back in a great fear, saying that he had
seen and spoken with an old man, that had seemed to be angry, but that
another person, all in white, had come between them, and had led him
by the hand to the right road; it could not be known why the child was
frightened, but he said that it was the way the old man looked, and
the suddenness with which he came and went; but of the other he had no
fear, though he knew him not. "And that, sir, is the tale."

Gilbert was very much astonished at the tale, and though he was not
credulous, the story dwelt strongly