"I recommend you to get outside of Oxford as fast as you can, and take
your womankind with you; and if you don't, you'll be sorry, that's all.
Now be off, and don't forget that you've been warned. Good night!"

"I have been warned thrice, friend. But where God has need of me, there
is my post, and there am I. There are penalties for desertion in the
army of the Lord. I thank you for your kindly meaning. Good night!"

"Poor fool!" said Stephen to himself as he fastened the postern behind
Gerhardt. "Yet--`penalties for desertion'--I don't know. Which is the
fool, I wonder? If I could have saved _her_!"

Gerhardt went back to the Walnut Tree, where they were sitting down to
the last meal. It consisted of "fat fish," apple turnovers, and spiced
ale.

"Eh dear!" said Isel, with a sigh. "To think that this is pretty nigh
the last supper you'll ever eat in this house, Derette! I could cry
with the best when I think of it."

"You can come to see me whenever you wish, Mother--much better than if I
were at Godstowe."

"So I can, child; but you can't come to me."

"I can send Leuesa to say that I want to see you."

"Well, and if so be that I've broken my leg that very morning, and am
lying groaning up atop of that ladder, with never a daughter to serve
me--how then? Thou gone, and Flemild gone, and not a creature near!"

"You'll have Ermine. But you are not going to break your leg, Mother, I
hope."

"You hope! Oh ay, hope's a fine trimming, but it's poor stuff for a
gown. And how long shall I have Ermine? She'll go and wed somebody or
other--you see if she doesn't."

Ermine smiled and shook her head.

"Well, then, you'll have Agnes."

"I shall have trouble--that's what I shall have: it's the only thing
sure in this world: and it's that loving it sticks to you all the
tighter if you've got nothing else. There's nought else does in this
world--without it's dogs."

"`There's a Friend that sticketh closer than a brother,'" quoted
Gerhardt softly.

"There's precious few of them," returned Isel, who naturally did not
understand the allusion. "You'll not find one of that sort more than
once in a--Mercy on us! here's a soldier walking straight in!--whatever
does the man want?"

Gerhardt's quick eyes had caught the foreign texture of the soldier's
mantle--the bronzed face with its likeness to Derette--the white cross
of the English Crusader.

"He wants his wife and children, I should think," he an