rd of
exhortation. "My children," said he, "if you are going to cut each
other's throats, I entreat you, in the name of peace and charity, to do
it out of the chapel."

"Sweet Matilda," said the earl, "did you give your love to the Earl
of Huntingdon, whose lands touch the Ouse and the Trent, or to Robert
Fitz-Ooth, the son of his mother?"

"Neither to the earl nor his earldom," answered Matilda firmly, "but to
Robert Fitz-Ooth and his love."

"That I well knew," said the earl; "and though the ceremony be
incomplete, we are not the less married in the eye of my only saint, our
Lady, who will yet bring us together. Lord Fitzwater, to your care, for
the present, I commit your daughter.--Nay, sweet Matilda, part we must
for a while; but we will soon meet under brighter skies, and be this the
seal of our faith."

He kissed Matilda's lips, and consigned her to the baron, who glowered
about him with an expression of countenance that showed he was mortally
wroth with somebody; but whatever he thought or felt he kept to himself.
The earl, with a sign to his followers, made a sudden charge on the
soldiers, with the intention of cutting his way through. The soldiers
were prepared for such an occurrence, and a desperate skirmish
succeeded. Some of the women screamed, but none of them fainted; for
fainting was not so much the fashion in those days, when the ladies
breakfasted on brawn and ale at sunrise, as in our more refined age of
green tea and muffins at noon. Matilda seemed disposed to fly again to
her lover, but the baron forced her from the chapel. The earl's bowmen
at the door sent in among the assailants a volley of arrows, one of
which whizzed past the ear of the abbot, who, in mortal fear of being
suddenly translated from a ghostly friar into a friarly ghost, began
to roll out of the chapel as fast as his bulk and his holy robes would
permit, roaring "Sacrilege!" with all his monks at his heels, who were,
like himself, more intent to go at once than to stand upon the order of
their going. The abbot, thus pressed from behind, and stumbling over
his own drapery before, fell suddenly prostrate in the door-way that
connected the chapel with the abbey, and was instantaneously buried
under a pyramid of ghostly carcasses, that fell over him and each other,
and lay a rolling chaos of animated rotundities, sprawling and bawling
in unseemly disarray, and sending forth the names of all the saints
in and out of heaven, amidst t