scullions at
fisticuffs, and a kitchen girl standing in the door-way scratching her
frowzy head.

It was all like a puppetshow of real life, each acting unconsciously a
part in the play. The cool wind came in through the rustling leaves and
fanned their cheeks, hot with the climb up the winding stair-way.

"We will call it our Eyry," said Gascoyne "and we will be the hawks that
live here." And that was how it got its name.

The next day Myles had the armorer make him a score of large spikes,
which he and Gascoyne drove between the ivy branches and into the cement
of the wall, and so made a safe passageway by which to reach the window
niche in the wall.

CHAPTER 11

THE TWO friends kept the secret of the Eyry to themselves for a little
while, now and then visiting the old tower to rummage among the lumber
stored in the lower room, or to loiter away the afternoon in the windy
solitudes of the upper heights. And in that little time, when the
ancient keep was to them a small world unknown to any but themselves--a
world far away above all the dull matters of every-day life--they talked
of many things that might else never have been known to one another.
Mostly they spoke the crude romantic thoughts and desires of boyhood's
time--chaff thrown to the wind, in which, however, lay a few stray
seeds, fated to fall to good earth, and to ripen to fruition in
manhood's day.

In the intimate talks of that time Myles imparted something of his
honest solidity to Gascoyne's somewhat weathercock nature, and to
Myles's ruder and more uncouth character Gascoyne lent a tone of his
gentler manners, learned in his pagehood service as attendant upon the
Countess and her ladies.

In other things, also, the character and experience of the one lad
helped to supply what was lacking in the other. Myles was replete with
old Latin gestes, fables, and sermons picked up during his school life,
in those intervals of his more serious studies when Prior Edward had
permitted him to browse in the greener pastures of the Gesta Romanorum
and the Disciplina Clericalis of the monastery library, and Gascoyne was
never weary of hearing him tell those marvellous stories culled from the
crabbed Latin of the old manuscript volumes.

Upon his part Gascoyne was full of the lore of the waiting-room and
the antechamber, and Myles, who in all his life had never known a lady,
young or old, excepting his mother, was never tired of lying silently
listening t