heather of it when hunting on Exmoor or the Brendons. There was not
much moon left now, either.

So I showed the note to Owen presently, and he puzzled over it,
seeing that it could not have been sent for nothing. At last we
both thought that whoever wrote it, or had it written, knew that
some attack would be made on us with the next moon, when it would
be likely that we might be riding homeward by its light with no
care against foes. That might well be called "sleeping in the
moonlight" as things were; and at all events we were warned in
time. The trouble to me was that it seemed to say that danger was
not all past.

However, when there was no moon at all I forgot the letter for the
time, no more trouble cropping up, and but for a chance word I
think that it had not come into my mind again until we were out in
the moonlight at some time. As we sat at table one evening when the
moon was almost at the full again, some one spoke of moonstruck
men, and that minded me, and set me thinking. He said that once he
himself had had a sore pain in the face by reason of the moonlight
falling on it when he was asleep, and another told somewhat the
same, until the talk drifted away to other things and they forgot
it. But now I remembered how that at our first coming here I had
waked in the early hours and seen a patch of moonlight from a high
southern window on the outer wall of the palace passing across
Owen's breast as he slept. Then I was on the floor across the door,
but now I slept in the same place that Owen had that night, while
he was on the couch across the room and under the window. It was
possible, therefore, that the light did fall on my face, but I was
pretty sure that if so it would have waked me.