us."

I knelt again and kissed his hand, and left his broad and pleasant
chamber.

And outside I strolled upon the green, dim vague thoughts surging up
swift into my mind, as I went striding on swifter than I knew. Ere long
I reached the extreme limit of the land, the high-piled rocks of
L'Ancresse. I looked out upon the sea to where Auremen lay flat and wide
against the sky, and I thought I could descry the Norman shores and La
Hague Cape stretching towards me; and, though I knew no home but the
Vale Cloister, another voice of home seemed calling me over thither. A
voice in which battlecries and trumpet-blasts were strangely mingled;
and I seemed to see men fighting and striving, and banners and pennons
flying; and a voice seemed to spring up from my soul, bidding me go
forth, and fight and strive with them, and gain something--I knew not
what.

I knew not then; but I know now, what that voice was, that yearning,
that discontent with the past. It was the Norman blood rising within me,
the blood of force, and battle, and achievement. Surely there is
something in us Normans--a hidden fire, which sends us forth and
onwards, and makes us claim what we will for our own! And having claimed
it, we fight for it, and fighting we win it. So with Tancred of
Hauteville, so with Rou, so with William. Will of iron, heart of fire! A
grand thing it is to be born a Norman.

CHAPTER II.

Of _Vale Castle_, hard by the Abbey, and how I was sent with a letter to
_Archbishop Maugher_, and by the way first saw the Sarrasin pirates at
work.

Now, men were busy in the Vale. I have yet said no word of Vale Castle,
built a mile away from the cloister, of hewn stone, goodly and strong.
It lay upon the left horn of St. Sampson's Harbour, near where that holy
man landed with the good news of God in days of old, and its stout
bastions rested on the bare rock, and its walls seemed one with the rock
below, so thick and stout they were, built as Normans alone can build,
to last as long as the rocks, as long as the earth. And in Vale Castle
no lord or baron ruled. It was the Castle and outward defence of the
Vale Cloister, and its lord was the Abbot of the Vale. And within its
ramparts there was room (as we found ere long), in times of danger from
pirate or strange foes, for all the brethren and children of the
Cloister, and for many more besides, so that when the watch-tower fire
sprang into life upon the beacon, and the alarm-bell ran