h a great curiosity, and some of them
with seeming contempt, at which I said nothing; and one of the two men
who had been my nurses in the sick chamber would follow me even through
the gardens, as I walked slowly abroad with a staff for the keen frosty
air; so that after some weeks I spoke to my lady about it, but she
answered me, shaking her hair about her shoulders, that she knew not
these western peasants as I did, and that in her father's hall there had
been no suspicions and no glances of double meaning. Then spoke I to the
man who followed me so faithfully as I have said, but he would answer
nothing save that he thought that something was in the air, and that the
spring would bring new flowers. Then asked I of young Heinrick, who
still awaited the death of Father Cefron, with those laughing eyes under
the wild light hair; but he laughed at me again, and told me that I was
a sick man on one side of my head now and suspected everybody, and that
I should send for a physician to plaster me--if he could find the side.
Now old Father Cefron seemed to have dried into one of his own
parchments, and his hide wrinkled, and almost rattled, as he walked.
Though he came to eat with us in the hall on holy days, and said long
prayers with somewhat worldly warnings after, yet he would on most days
eat in his own chamber, and that of the least and coarsest, and would
drink only of the ice-cold water from the well. I went to him at last
and questioned him, and asked him if he had noticed the glances cast
upon me, and the whispering and the sudden ceasing of the women's
tongues when I came into the room, but he answered "No!" that he had
noticed none of these things, for he was too much taken up in battles
and kings and the histories of nations, to see aught that passed about
him; and then he told me of the ancient days, and of the mighty, warm,
strange, empires of the south and east, and spoke a hundred names of
battles and knew every half-month of the history of the Church; and so I
left him, comforted with learning, and went and sat and looked out on
the snow, and thought of all that he had said.

The acts of the night that broke my life were short and quick, yet they
are too long for the telling; still I will try, for without them you
will not understand the strange end of this tale by the grey wolves.

It was the next night after this, and I had sat late in the hall, just
beginning now to find strength enough to think of what I