elves always to have right and justice upon their
side, even when they most wish evil to others."

So spoke the gentle old priest, who looked from his peaceful haven with
dreamy eyes upon the sweat and tussle of the world's battle. Had he
instead been in the thick of the fight, it might have been harder for
him to believe that his enemies ever had right upon their side.

"But tell me this," said Myles, presently, "dost thou, then, think that
I do evil in seeking to do a battle of life or death with this wicked
Earl of Alban, who hath so ruined my father in body and fortune?"

"Nay," said Prior Edward, thoughtfully, "I say not that thou doest evil.
War and bloodshed seem hard and cruel matters to me; but God hath given
that they be in the world, and may He forbid that such a poor worm as I
should say that they be all wrong and evil. Meseems even an evil thing
is sometimes passing good when rightfully used."

Myles did not fully understand what the old man meant, but this much he
gathered, that his spiritual father did not think ill of his fighting
the Earl of Alban for his temporal father's sake.

So Myles went to France in Lord George's company, a soldier of fortune,
as his Captain was. He was there for only six months, but those six
months wrought a great change in his life. In the fierce factional
battles that raged around the walls of Paris; in the evil life which
he saw at the Burgundian court in Paris itself after the truce--a court
brilliant and wicked, witty and cruel--the wonderful liquor of youth had
evaporated rapidly, and his character had crystallized as rapidly into
the hardness of manhood. The warfare, the blood, the evil pleasures
which he had seen had been a fiery, crucible test to his soul, and I
love my hero that he should have come forth from it so well. He was no
longer the innocent Sir Galahad who had walked in pure white up the
Long Hall to be knighted by the King, but his soul was of that grim,
sterling, rugged sort that looked out calmly from his gray eyes upon the
wickedness and debauchery around him, and loved it not.

Then one day a courier came, bringing a packet. It was a letter from the
Earl, bidding Myles return straightway to England and to Mackworth House
upon the Strand, nigh to London, without delay, and Myles knew that his
time had come.

It was a bright day in April when he and Gascoyne rode clattering out
through Temple Bar, leaving behind them quaint old London town, its
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