esperate fighting, wherein we had
the best of that fight and slew most of them, albeit my horse was
slain and my mail-coif cut through. Then I bade a squire fetch me
another horse, and began meanwhile to upbraid those knights for
running in such a strange disorderly race, instead of standing and
fighting cleverly. Moreover we had drifted even in this successful
fight still nearer to the pass, so that the conies who dwelt there
were beginning to consider whether they should not run into their
holes.

But one of those knights said: "Be not angry with me. Sir Florian, but
do you think you will go to Heaven?"

"The saints! I hope so," I said, but one who stood near him whispered
to him to hold his peace, so I cried out: "0 friend! I hold this world
and all therein so cheap now, that I see not anything in it but shame
which can any longer anger me; wherefore speak: out."

"Then, Sir Florian, men say that at your christening some fiend took
on him the likeness of a priest and strove to baptize you in the
Devil's name, but God had mercy on you so that the fiend could not
choose but baptize you in the name of the most holy Trinity: and yet
men say that you hardly believe any doctrine such as other men do, and
will at the end only go to Heaven round about as it were, not at all
by the intercession of our Lady; they say too that you can see no
ghosts or other wonders, whatever happens to other Christian men."

I smiled. "Well, friend, I scarcely call this a disadvantage,
moreover what has it to do with the matter in hand?"

How was this in Heaven's name? We had been quite still, resting while
this talk was going on, but we could hear the hawks chattering from
the rocks, we were so close now.

And my heart sunk within me, there was no reason why this should not
be true; there was no reason why anything should not be true.

"This, Sir Florian," said the knight again, "how would you feel
inclined to fight if you thought that everything about you was mere
glamour; this earth here, the rocks, the sun, the sky? I do not know
where I am for certain, I do not know that it is not midnight instead
of undem: I do not know if I have been fighting men or only simulacra
but I think, we all think, that we have been led into some devil's
trap or other, and- and may God forgive me my sins! I wish I had never
been born."

There now! he was weeping - they all wept - how strange it was to see
those rough, bearded men blubbering there, and