“I have planned that, each day, Mistress Deborah, with the baggage and a good escort, shall go by the most direct route, and the best road.  Thus thou and I will be free to ride as we will, visiting places we have known of old and which it may please thee to see again.  To-day we can ride out by Kenilworth, and so on our first stage northward.  Martin will take Mistress Deborah on a pillion behind him.  Should she weary of travelling so, she can have a seat in the cart with the baggage.  But they tell me she travels bravely on horseback.  We will send them on ahead of us, and on arrival all will be in readiness for thee.  If this weather holds, we shall ride each day through a world of sunshine and beauty; and each day’s close, my wife, will find us one day nearer home.  Does this please thee?  Have I thought of all?”

Rising, she came and stood beside him in the entrance to the arbour.

A golden rose, dipping from above, rested against her hair.

Her eyes were soft with tears.

“So perfectly have you thought and planned, dear faithful Knight, that I think our blessed Lady must have guided you.  As we ride out into the sunshine, I shall grow used to the great world once more; and you will have patience and will teach me things I have perhaps forgot.”

She hesitated; half put out her hands; but his not meeting them, folded them on her breast.

“Hugh, it seems hard that I should clip your splendid wings; but—­oh, Hugh!  Think you the heart of a nun can ever become again as the heart of other women?”

“Heaven forbid!” said the Knight, fervently, thinking of Eleanor and Alfrida.

And, as leaving the arbour they walked together over the lawn, she smiled, remembering, how that morning the Bishop had answered the same question in precisely the same words.  Whatever Father Gervaise might have said, the Bishop and the Knight were agreed!

Yet she wished, somewhat wistfully, that this most dear and loyal Knight had taken her hands when she held them out.

She would have liked to feel the strong clasp of his upon them.

Possibly our Lady, who knoweth the heart of a woman, had guided the Knight in this matter also.

CHAPTER XLI

WHAT THE BISHOP REMEMBERED

Symon, Bishop of Worcester, sat in his library, in the cool of the day.

He was weary, with a weariness which surpassed all his previous experience of weariness, all his imaginings as to how weary, in body and spirit, a man could be, yet continue to breathe and think.

With some, extreme fatigue leads to restlessness of body.  Not so with the Bishop.  The more tired he was, the more perfectly still he sat; his knees crossed, his elbows on the arms of his chair, the fingers of both hands pressed lightly together, his head resting against the high back of the chair, his gaze fixed upon the view across the river.