Pierre's castle, and tell Count Pierre to give us
back our meadow and sheep, for we cannot pay the tax, and mother says we
will starve."

Now in the little prayers that the monks added at the end of a book, it
was the custom to ask only that their sins might be forgiven. But
Gabriel, though he knew he had plenty of sins,--for so the parish priest
of St. Martin's village told all the peasant folk every Sunday,--yet
somehow could not feel nearly so anxious to have them forgiven, as he
was to have his father freed from prison in the castle, and their little
farm and flock restored to them; and so he had decided to word his
prayer the way he did.

It took him some time to write it out, for he took great pains to shape
every letter as perfectly as possible. Nor did he forget that Brother
Stephen had taught him always to make the word God more beautiful than
the others; so he wrote that in scarlet ink, and edged it with scallops
and loops and little dots of blue; and then all around the whole prayer
he made graceful flourishes of the coloured inks. He very much wished
for a bit of gold with which to enrich his work, but gold was too
precious for little boys to practise with, and so Brother Stephen had
not given him any for his own. Nevertheless, when the page was finished,
the artistic effect was very pleasing, and it really was a remarkably
clever piece of work for a little boy to have made.

He did not tell Brother Stephen what he was doing, for he was afraid
that perhaps he might not quite approve of his plan. Not that Gabriel
wished for a moment to do anything that Brother Stephen would not like
him to do, but only that he thought their affairs at home so desperate
that he could not afford to risk losing this means of help;--and then,
too, he felt that the prayer was his own little secret, and he did not
want to tell any one about it anyway.

And so he was greatly relieved that Brother Stephen, who was very much
absorbed in his own work, did not ask him any questions. The monk was
always very kind about helping him in every way possible, but never
insisted on Gabriel's showing him everything, wisely thinking that many
times it was best to let the boy work out his own ideas. So Gabriel said
nothing about his page, but put it carefully away, until he could find
some opportunity to place it in the book itself.

Meantime Brother Stephen worked industriously, and in a few days more he
had quite finished the book. He had