ke mine. I am not just now in the vein for being picked off at a
long shot." And saying these words, he spurred up his four-footed better
half, and galloped off as nimbly as if he had had an arrow singing
behind him.

"Is this lady Matilda, then, so very terrible a damsel?" said Sir Ralph
to brother Michael.

"By no means," said the friar. "She has certainly a high spirit; but it
is the wing of the eagle, without his beak or his claw. She is as gentle
as magnanimous; but it is the gentleness of the summer wind, which,
however lightly it wave the tuft of the pine, carries with it the
intimation of a power, that, if roused to its extremity, could make it
bend to the dust."

"From the warmth of your panegyric, ghostly father," said the knight, "I
should almost suspect you were in love with the damsel."

"So I am," said the friar, "and I care not who knows it; but all in the
way of honesty, master soldier. I am, as it were, her spiritual lover;
and were she a damsel errant, I would be her ghostly esquire, her friar
militant. I would buckle me in armour of proof, and the devil might
thresh me black with an iron flail, before I would knock under in
her cause. Though they be not yet one canonically, thanks to your
soldiership, the earl is her liege lord, and she is his liege lady. I
am her father confessor and ghostly director: I have taken on me to show
her the way to the next world; and how can I do that if I lose sight of
her in this? seeing that this is but the road to the other, and has so
many circumvolutions and ramifications of byeways and beaten paths (all
more thickly set than the true one with finger-posts and milestones,
not one of which tells truth), that a traveller has need of some one who
knows the way, or the odds go hard against him that he will ever see the
face of Saint Peter."

"But there must surely be some reason," said Sir Ralph, "for father
Peter's apprehension."

"None," said brother Michael, "but the apprehension itself; fear being
its own father, and most prolific in self-propagation. The lady did, it
is true, once signalize her displeasure against our little brother,
for reprimanding her in that she would go hunting a-mornings instead
of attending matins. She cut short the thread of his eloquence by
sportively drawing her bow-string and loosing an arrow over his head;
he waddled off with singular speed, and was in much awe of her for many
months. I thought he had forgotten it: but let that p