saved. And I had forgotten Eastdean, save as one keeps a memory of
the home where one was a child. I never thought of it as a place
that should have been mine, for neither the king nor Owen ever
spoke to me concerning it. Sometimes, in remembrances of my father,
I would wonder into whose hands the manors had passed, but rather
in hopes that some day those who owned them now would suffer me to
see that the grave where he lay was honoured, rather than as a
matter which at all concerned me in any closer way.

For, since I was but a child, the court had been my home, with Owen
as my father, and Ina the king as the loved guardian for whom I
would gladly give my life in need. All my training and thoughts
were centred here, not as what one calls a courtier at all, but as
one of the household who feared the king and queen no more than
Owen himself, and yet reverenced all three as those to whom all
homage was due since he could remember.

Thus things were with us at the end of the tenth year after we left
Aldhelm at Malmesbury, and now the court was at Glastonbury in fair
Somerset, keeping the Christmastide there in the place that is the
holiest in all England by reason of the coming thither of Joseph of
Arimathea, and the first preaching of the Gospel in our land by
him. It was not by any means the first time I had been in the
place, and here I had some good friends indeed; for Ina loved the
vale of Avalon well, and often came hither with a few of us, or
with the whole court, to the house which he had made that he might
watch the building of the wondrous church which he was raising over
the very spot where the little chapel of the saint had been in the
old days.