to you, to please you and keep you quiet.--Ah! poor child!"

The young man cried out as if in sorrow, and lifted Master Richard's
hand and kissed it.

Master Richard told me that when he heard that it was as a blow in the
face to him. He could not answer, nor even think clearly. It was as if a
gross darkness, full of wings and eyes and mocking faces pressed upon
him, and he believed that he cried out, and that he must have swooned,
for when he came to himself again his face was all wet with water that
the young man had thrown upon it.

It was a minute or two more before he could speak, and during that time
it appeared to him that he did not think himself, but that ideas moved
before his eyes, manifesting themselves. At first there was a doubt as
to whether the young man had spoken the truth, and whether any messenger
had been to the village at all, but the mention of the hazels, the stag
and the pig, and his books, dispelled that thought.

Again it did not seem possible that the young man should have lied as
to what it was that I was said to have answered; if they had wished to
lie, surely they would have lied more entirely, and related that I had
denied all knowledge of him. But the falsehood was so subtle an one; it
was so well interwoven with truth that I count it to have been
impossible for Master Richard in his sickness and confusion to have
disentangled the one from the other. I have heard a physician say, too,
that the surest manner to perplex a man is to suggest to him that his
brain is clouded; at such words he often loses all knowledge of self; he
doubts his own thoughts, and even his senses.