this way and that, that the failing light
might fall upon it, he said that beneath him in the little street there
was a crowd assembled, all silent and watching the heavenly colloquy.

When he looked again, questioning, at the holy old man, he saw that the
other's face was puckered with thought and that his lips pouted through
the long-falling hair. Then it disappeared, and a grunting voice came
out of the dark, but the sound of it was as if the old man wept.

"I do not know the message, brother. Our Lord has not shewed it to me,
but He has shewed me this--that soon you will not need to wear His
wounds. That I have to say. _Oremus pro invicem._" ["Let us pray for one
another."]

* * * * *

The crowd pressed close upon Master Richard as he came down from the
window, and, going in the midst of them in silence, he came to saint
Peter's gate where the black monks dwell, and was admitted by the
porter.

How Master Richard saw the King in Westminster Hall: and of the Mass at
Saint Edward's Altar

_Revelabit condensa: et in templo ejus omnes dicent gloriam._

He will discover the thick woods: and in His temple all shall speak His
glory.--_Ps. xxviii. 9._

IV

Master Richard did not tell me a great deal of his welcome in the
monastery: I think that he was hardly treated and flouted, for the
professed monks like not solitaries except those that be established in
reputation; they call them self-willed and lawless and pretending to a
sanctity that is none of theirs. Such as be under obedience think that
virtue the highest of all and essential to the way of perfection. And I
think, perhaps, they were encouraged in this by what had been said of
themselves by our holy lord ten years before, for he was ever a favourer
of monks. [This may have been Eugenius IV., called _Gloriosus_. If so,
it would fix the date of Richard at about 1444.] But Master Richard did
not blame them, so I will not, but I know that he was given no cell to
be private in, but was sent to mix with the other guests in the common
guest-house. I know not what happened there, but I think there was an
uproar; there was a wound upon his head, the first wound that he
received in the house of his friends, that I saw on him a little later,
and he told me he had had it on his first coming to London. It was such
a wound as a flung bone or billet of wood might make. He had now the
_caput vulneratum_, as well as the _cor vul