yet went up pitifully
to the sky.

And shortly after these solemn offices I was taken by Hugo to the
abbot's presence, in the little chamber he had on the seaward wall.
Very strange and careworn he was.

"Son," he said, greeting me with a sweet dignity, "thou hast done well
already in the profession thou hast chosen, as I hear by good report of
all, and indeed so comes out in thee the prowess of a noble race. Thou
seest what straits the brethren are in by this blockade and siege?" He
pointed seaward and landward. "And that, should help come not, a
deadlier enemy than the Sarrasin himself will strive with us--the famine
with the sword. Thou knowest all this?"

Now, as he spake, I guessed why he spake thus, and so right boldly I
replied, with a straight look in his eyes--

"Ay, my lord, right well I know. Send me, therefore, now, whither thou
thinkest well, for succour in this day of extremity!"

His eye brightened at my words, and he and Hugo looked gladly at one
another, and Hugo said, with low voice, proudly--

"Our Father, the abbot, hath chosen thee, my esquire, and a proud
mission it is, being assured of thy strength and truth of heart, to be
his messenger to our sovereign lord the duke, and to inform him of the
dangers of his faithful bedesmen here, and of the arrogance of their
foes and his own. To-night thou wilt start on a noble and knightly
enterprise."

"It is, my son," said the abbot, "a path full of danger. But also, as
our brother saith, an enterprise both noble and knightly, for the saving
of these men of God, and the feeble ones that are sheltered in our fold,
not alone from death, but from rude insult and sharp pain."

I told my lord that I was indeed willing to accept it, though I loved
life full dearly. And he, assuring me that all matters of my setting
forth that night were in Brother Hugo's hands, bent over me, and
pressing his hands, that trembled the while, on my young head, committed
me to God's care. And I went forth calm and steady with his holy words
yet in my ears and a great glory of gladness in my heart, that I, still
a lad, was thus chosen for a knight's work.

I was to set out, Hugo told me, at nightfall from a little cove named
Bordeaux Bay that lay hard by the Castle. Old Simon Renouf, a wary pilot
amid the dangerous rocks and shallows of our seas, was, with one other,
to be my comrade, and I was to be clad in the rough dress of the fisher
folk in case of capture. We were tha