ers so. The man had a forked beard and a kind of secret smile,
as if he mocked the onlooker; and he seemed unpleasantly natural to
the boy, as though he divined his thought. He was half minded to put
the stone back; but the secrecy of the thing pleased him. Moreover as
he held the stone to the light, it seemed half transparent, and sent
out a dull red gleam.

So the boy put the stone in his pouch, and soon loved it exceedingly,
and desired to keep it with him. He often thrust it in secret places
inside and outside the castle, in holes in a hollow elder tree, or
chinks of the wall, and it pleased him when he lay in bed on windy
rainy nights, to think of the stone lying snug and warm in its small
house. Soon he began to attribute a kind of virtue to the thing; he
thought that events went better when he had it with him; and he named
it in his mind _The Wound_, because it seemed to him like the red and
jewelled wound in the side of the figure of Our Saviour that hung in
coloured glass over the chapel altar.

One day he had a terrible shock; he was lying on the terrace,
spinning the stone, and watching the little whirling gleams of red
light it made on the flags, when a man-at-arms stole upon him, and in
wantonness seized the stone, and flung it far into the moat, where it
fell with a splash. The boy was angry and smote the man upon the face
with all his might, and was sorely beaten for it--for they had no
respect for the heir, and indeed there was no one to whom he could
complain--but he held his peace; and a week after the stone was
restored to him in a way that seemed miraculous; for they ran the
water of the moat off, to mend the sluice, so that the water-lilies
sank in tangles to the bottom and the carp flapped in the mud; but the
boy found the stone lying on the pavement of the sluice.

But the fancy for the stone soon came to an end, as a boy's fancies
will; and he carried it with him, or put it into one of his
hiding-places and thought no more of _The Wound_.

Suddenly the peaceful, idle and evil life came to a close. One day he
had heard the tinkle of the sacring bell in the chapel, and had
slipped in and found the priest at mass--the boy had a curious love
for the mass; he liked to see the quaint movements of the priest in
his embroidered robe, and a sort of peace settled upon his spirit--and
this day he knelt near the screen and sniffed the incense, when he
heard a sound behind him, and turning, saw a man boot