ere any more attacks made on Owen, so that after a little while
we went about, hunting and hawking, in all freedom, for danger
seemed to have passed with the taking of Dunwal as hostage.

Then one day a guard from the gate brought me a folded paper, on
which my name was written in a fair hand, saying that it had been
left for me by a swineherd from the hill, who said that it was from
some mass priest whom I knew. The guard had let the man go away,
deeming that, of course, there was no need to keep him. Nor had
they asked who the priest might be, as it was said that I knew him.

I took the letter idly and went to my stables with it in my hand,
and opened and read it as I walked.

"To Oswald, son of Owen.--It is not good to sleep in the
moonlight."

That was all it said, and there was no name at the end of it. I
thought it foolish enough, for every one knows that the cold white
light of the moon is held to be harmful for sleepers in the open
air. But I was not in the way of sleeping out in this early season
with its cold, though, of course, it was always possible that one
might be belated on the hills and have to make a night in the
heather of it when hunting on Exmoor or the Brendons. There was not
much moon left now, either.

So I showed the note to Owen presently, and he puzzled over it,
seeing that it could not have been sent for nothing. At last we
both thought that whoever wrote it, or had it written, knew that
some attack would be made on us with the next moon, when it would
be likely that we might be riding homeward by its light with no
care against foes. That might well be called "sleeping in the
moonlight" as things were; and at all events we were warned in
time. The trouble to me was that it seemed to say that danger was
not all past.

However, when there was no moon at all I forgot the letter for the
time, no more trouble cropping up, and but for a chance word I
think that it had not come into my mind again until we were out in
the moonlight at some time. As we sat at table one evening when the
moon was almost at the full again, some one spoke of moonstruck
men, and that minded me, and set me thinking. He said that once he
himself had had a sore pain in the face by reason of the moonlight
falling on it when he was asleep, and another told somewhat the
same, until the talk drifted away to other things and they forgot
it. But now I remembered how that at our first coming here I had
waked in the early ho