ourtesies. Salut.

In a horror I summoned up the brothers, as they trooped out from
compline-prayer, and two of the stoutest bore Ralf gently to the
refectory. There, drugs and good care brought the life back to his eyes,
and he smiled on us as though half in fear that we were foes.

We would have had him speak; but he spake not. And the abbot came, calm
and unmoved yet, but a glitter of keen light kept glancing
lightning-like from his eyes, and he said, as he stood by the settle
whereon he lay--

"Speak, dear son--speak to us thy brethren."

Ralf struggled, and raised his heavy hand, and but babbled without
meaning.

A quick burst of colour rushed into the abbot's face. Calm, stately,
still, with a very blaze of anger hidden in his eyes, that we trembled
again, he stood with that red glow in his cheeks.

"He speaks not--for he is distraught," he said. "What shall God do to
men that rob their brothers of His noblest gift--the gift of reason?"

For a moment he stood in prayer, and then raised his shapely hand and
blessed him thrice, and then bid us bear him to the sick-house, where
sisters nursed him tenderly to life, and won him back much of strength
and health--but never the gift, the abbot called God's noblest gift--for
he had left that for ever behind in the chateau on the hill.

Now, this Brother Ralf had set out three weeks before in a trader's bark
that sailed for Granville Harbour in Normandy. And he had borne most
urgent missives from our abbot to Duke William. In them was writ how
that a castle of ill-fame was already built, in them that the arch-foe
himself, that so harried St. Brieuc with a very fleet of ships, either
lay in the harbour, or in the new chateau.

But thus three things we knew. First, that as yet Duke William had had
no word of the evil presumption of this foul settler in the isle, and
could therefore send none to destroy him, and that therefore we had for
the time naught but our own hands and walls to succour us. And next, we
understood, that there was indeed between Le Grand Geoffroy and
ourselves war that none could stay with prayer or supplication to men or
to God. For whereas he knew we had sent to the duke, the sternest
sweeper from land or sea of robber and marauder, to deliver us--so we
knew, as we thought of Ralf, that life and life's joy would have for us
neither sweetness nor endurance, if he went free, who had been to our
brother without mercy and without pity. And, lastly,