And again:

Lo, children and the fruit of the womb
are an heritage and gift that cometh of the Lord.

The two boys whom he had so strangely adopted came to the mind of
the earl; they were not of his blood, yet they might be "an
heritage and gift of the Lord." And as the psalms rose and fell to
the rugged old Gregorian tones--old even then--their words seemed
to Simon de Montfort as the voice of God.

Oh! how rough, yet how grand that old psalmody was! Modern ears
call its intervals harsh, its melodies crude, but it spoke to the
heart with a power which our sweet modern chants often fail to
exercise over us, as we chant the same sacred lays.

______________________________________________________________


Nightfall--night hung like a pall over the island, over the moat,
over the silent heath and woods; the snow kept falling, falling;
the fires kept blazing in the huge hearths; and the bell kept
tolling until curfew time, by the prior's order, that if any were
lost in the wild night they might be guided by its sound to
shelter.

The earl slept soundly in his little monastic cell that night, and
in the morning he perceived the light of a bright dawn through the
narrow window; anon the winter's sun rose, all glorious, and the
frost and snow sparkled like the sheen of diamonds in its beams.