A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex by Charles W. (Charles Watts) Whistler
page 204 of 401 (50%)
page 204 of 401 (50%)
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At all events, if the letter had aught to do with that, it was a cumbrous way of letting me know that my bed was in a bad place for quiet sleep. The only thing that seemed likely thus was that the good priest who wrote had left the palace before he had remembered to tell me how he had fared in that room once, and so sent back word. There were many priests backward and forward here, as at Glastonbury with Ina. Then it seemed plain that this was the meaning of the whole thing, and so I would hang a cloak over the window by and by. And, of course, having settled the question in my own mind, I forgot to do that, and was like to have paid dearly for forgetting. Two nights afterward, when the moon was at the full, I woke from sleep suddenly with the surety that I heard my name called softly. I was wide awake in a moment, and found the room bright with moonlight that did indeed lie in a broad square right across my chest on the furs that covered me. I glanced across to Owen, but he was asleep, as there was full light enough to see, and then I wondered why I seemed to have heard that call. In a few moments I knew that, and also that the voice I heard was the one that had come to me in sore danger before. Idly and almost sleeping again I watched the light, to see if indeed it was going to cross my face, and then a sudden shadow flitted across it, and with a hiss and flick of feathers a long arrow fled through the window and stuck in the plaster of the wall not an inch above my chest, furrowing the fur of the white bearskin over me, so close was it. |
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