alked to the church hard by with two of the serving women to
make it ready for the Friday's mass, after the feast of the
peasants that had been held in the nave. Coming to his oaken
chair by the open hearth which had a chimney to it--no common
thing in those days--they knelt before him.

"What is it now, my nephews?" asked the old man, smiling. "Do you
wish that I should knight you afresh?"

"No, sir," answered Godwin; "we seek a greater boon."

"Then you seek in vain, for there is none."

"Another sort of boon," broke in Wulf.

Sir Andrew pulled his beard, and looked at them. Perhaps the
Prior John had spoken a word to him, and he guessed what was
coming.

"Speak," he said to Godwin. "The gift is great that I would not
give to either of you if it be within my power."

"Sir," said Godwin, "we seek the leave to ask your daughter's
hand in marriage."

"What! the two of you?"

"Yes, sir; the two of us."

Then Sir Andrew, who seldom laughed, laughed outright.

"Truly," he said, "of all the strange things I have known, this
is the strangest--that two knights should ask one wife between
them."

"It seems strange, sir; but when you have heard our tale you will
understand."

So he listened while they told him all that had passed between
them and of the solemn oath which they had sworn.

"Noble in this as in other things," commented Sir Andrew when
they had done; "but I fear that one of you may find that vow hard
to keep. By all the saints, nephews, you were right when you said
that you asked a great boon. Do you know, although I have told
you nothing of it, that, not to speak of the knave Lozelle,
already two of the greatest men in this land have sought my
daughter Rosamund in marriage?"

"It may well be so," said Wulf.

"It is so, and now I will tell you why one or other of the pair
is not her husband, which in some ways I would he were. A simple
reason. I asked her, and she had no mind to either, and as her
mother married where her heart was, so I have sworn that the
daughter should do, or not at all--for better a nunnery than a
loveless bridal.

"Now let us see what you have to give. You are of good
blood--that of Uluin by your mother, and mine, also on one side
her own. As squires to your sponsors of yesterday, the knights
Sir Anthony de Mandeville and Sir Roger de Merci, you bore
yourselves bravely in the Scottish War; indeed, your liege king
Henry remembered it, and that is why he granted my pray