of his sweet minstrelsy on the
very eve of his voice being hushed for ever, came sadly to their
minds. At length Etienne broke the silence.

"Draw forth the arrow," he said.

They drew it forth and gave it him, bloodstained as it was: he
looked closely upon it.

"This is an arrow from the same quiver as that which killed
Gislebert; it is of English make, such as those clumsy louts use."

It was indeed a heavy, broad shaft, quite unlike the slender,
tapering arrows of Norman workmanship, adapted for a long flight,
in days when a furlong was considered a boy's distance.

"Our own serfs turn upon us. Well, they will rue it ere long; a
short shrift and a long rope will be their portion."

"Ah! I remember noticing such in the quiver of the young thrall
Eadwin," said Pierre--"he whose hand you sought to cut off for
poaching."

They said no more on that occasion, but pursued in silence the
train of thought suggested.

It was a strange gathering that night at the castle; for corpse
after corpse was borne in from the woods to receive Christian
burial at the priory, all killed by arrows, and those arrows--which
the slayers had not troubled to remove, as if they disdained
reprisals--all of the clumsy sort used by the "aborigines"

CHAPTER IX. A HUNT IN THE WOODS.

The winter of the year 1068 was setting in with great severity,
sharp winds from the north and east had already stripped the faded
leaves from the trees of the forest, and the heavens were
frequently veiled by dark masses of cloud, from whence fast-falling
snow ever and anon descended.

The winter opened drearily for the inhabitants of Aescendune, for
the "mystery of the forest" was yet unsolved; none knew whence
those incendiaries had issued who had given Yew Farm, with all its
inmates, to the vengeful flames; but that this latter conflagration
was in some way connected with the earlier destruction of St.
Wilfred's Priory seemed not unlikely to most men.

Hugo de Malville cum Aescendune was not the man to sit calmly on
the battlements of his newly-built towers and survey the
destruction of his property, although he was not free from a
terrible dread that his sins were finding him out, at which times
he was like a haunted man who sees spectres, invisible to the world
around.

Well did he surmise from whom the deadly provocation came, the loss
of his farm, the death of a noble lad committed to his care; not to
mention the loss of some common men,