adorned with golden bees, and brother Francis with the "Slaying of the
Innocents" most daintily set forth upon vellum. All these were
duly packed away deep in the traveller's scrip, and above them old
pippin-faced brother Athanasius had placed a parcel of simnel bread and
rammel cheese, with a small flask of the famous blue-sealed Abbey wine.
So, amid hand-shakings and laughings and blessings, Alleyne Edricson
turned his back upon Beaulieu.

At the turn of the road he stopped and gazed back. There was the
wide-spread building which he knew so well, the Abbot's house, the long
church, the cloisters with their line of arches, all bathed and mellowed
in the evening sun. There too was the broad sweep of the river Exe, the
old stone well, the canopied niche of the Virgin, and in the centre of
all the cluster of white-robed figures who waved their hands to him. A
sudden mist swam up before the young man's eyes, and he turned away upon
his journey with a heavy heart and a choking throat.

CHAPTER III. HOW HORDLE JOHN COZENED THE FULLER OF LYMINGTON.

It is not, however, in the nature of things that a lad of twenty, with
young life glowing in his veins and all the wide world before him,
should spend his first hours of freedom in mourning for what he had
left. Long ere Alleyne was out of sound of the Beaulieu bells he was
striding sturdily along, swinging his staff and whistling as merrily as
the birds in the thicket. It was an evening to raise a man's heart. The
sun shining slantwise through the trees threw delicate traceries across
the road, with bars of golden light between. Away in the distance
before and behind, the green boughs, now turning in places to a coppery
redness, shot their broad arches across the track. The still summer air
was heavy with the resinous smell of the great forest. Here and there a
tawny brook prattled out from among the underwood and lost itself again
in the ferns and brambles upon the further side. Save the dull piping of
insects and the sough of the leaves, there was silence everywhere--the
sweet restful silence of nature.

And yet there was no want of life--the whole wide wood was full of it.
Now it was a lithe, furtive stoat which shot across the path upon some
fell errand of its own; then it was a wild cat which squatted upon the
outlying branch of an oak and peeped at the traveller with a yellow and
dubious eye. Once it was a wild sow which scuttled out of the bracken,
with two young