at Una, who nodded and
skipped.

'There, after they had scattered his pack up and down the Great Hall,
some young knights carried him to an upper room, and dropped him into a
well in a wall, that rose and fell with the tide. They called him
Joseph, and threw torches at his wet head. Why not?'

'Why, of course!'cried Dan. 'Didn't you know it was--' Puck held up
his hand to stop him, and Kadmiel, who never noticed, went on.

'When the tide dropped he thought he stood on old armour, but feeling
with his toes, he raked up bar on bar of soft gold. Some wicked
treasure of the old days put away, and the secret cut off by the sword.
I have heard the like before.'

'So have we,' Una whispered. 'But it wasn't wicked a bit.'

'Elias took a little of the stuff with him, and thrice yearly he would
return to Pevensey as a chapman, selling at no price or profit, till
they suffered him to sleep in the empty room, where he would plumb and
grope, and steal away a few bars. The great store of it still
remained, and by long brooding he had come to look on it as his own.
Yet when we thought how we should lift and convey it, we saw no way.
This was before the Word of the Lord had come to me. A walled fortress
possessed by Normans; in the midst a forty-foot tide-well out of which
to remove secretly many horse-loads of gold! Hopeless! So Elias wept.
Adah, his wife, wept too. She had hoped to stand beside the Queen's
Christian tiring-maids at Court when the King should give them that
place at Court which he had promised. Why not? She was born in
England--an odious woman.

'The present evil to us was that Elias, out of his strong folly, had,
as it were, promised the King that he would arm him with more gold.
Wherefore the King in his camp stopped his ears against the Barons and
the people. Wherefore men died daily. Adah so desired her place at
Court, she besought Elias to tell the King where the treasure lay, that
the King might take it by force, and--they would trust in his
gratitude. Why not? This Elias refused to do, for he looked on the
gold as his own. They quarrelled, and they wept at the evening meal,
and late in the night came one Langton--a priest, almost learned--to
borrow more money for the Barons. Elias and Adah went to their
chamber.'

Kadmiel laughed scornfully in his beard. The shots across the valley
stopped as the shooting party changed their ground for the last beat.

'So it was I, not Elias,' he went