* *

Now, here is a very wonderful thing, and I know not if I can make it
clear.

You understand, my children, a little of what I heard from Master
Richard's lips--of what it was that he suffered. But although all this
was upon him, he perceived afterwards, though not at the time, that
there was something in him that had not yielded to the agony. His body
was broken, and his mind amazed, and his soul obscured in this _Night_,
yet there was one power more, that we name the Will (and that is the
very essence of man, by which he shall be judged), that had not yet sunk
or cried out that it was so as the fiend suggested.

There was within him, he perceived afterwards, a conflict without
movement. It was as when two men wrestle, their limbs are locked, they
are motionless, they appear to be at rest, but in truth they are
striving with might and main.

So he remained all that night in this agony, not knowing that he did
aught but suffer; he saw the light on the wall, and heard the cocks
crow--at least he remembered these things afterwards. But his release
did not come until the morning; and of that release, and its event, and
how it came about, I will now tell you.

How Sir John went again to the cell: and of what he saw there

_Ecce audivimus eam in Ephrata: invenimus eam in campis silvae._

Behold we have heard of it in Euphrata: we have found it in the fields
of the wood.--_Ps. cxxxi. 6._

XII

It is strange to think that other men went about their business in the
palace, and knew nothing of what was passing. It is more strange that
that morning I said mass in the country and did not faint for fear or
sorrow. But it is always so, by God's loving-kindness, for no man could
bear to live if he knew all that was happening in the world at one time.
[Sir John adds some trite reflections of an obvious character.]....

There was a little heaviness upon me that morning, but I think no more
than there had been every day since Master Richard had left us. It was
not until noon that a strange event happened to me. This day was
Wednesday after Corpus Christi, the sixth day since he was gone.

There was only one man that knew aught of what was passing in the
interior world, and that was the ankret in the cell against the abbey,
but of that you shall hear in the proper place.

Of what fell on that day I heard from an old priest whom I saw
afterwards, and who was in the palace at that time. He was chaplain