lay with their legs crossed, as being from the Crusades. Six
others rested their feet upon lions, as having died in war. Four
only lay with the effigy of their hounds to show that they had
passed in peace.

Of this famous but impoverished family, doubly impoverished by law
and by pestilence, two members were living in the year of grace
1349--Lady Ermyntrude Loring and her grandson Nigel. Lady
Ermyntrude's husband had fallen before the Scottish spearsmen at
Stirling, and her son Eustace, Nigel's father, had found a
glorious death nine years before this chronicle opens upon the
poop of a Norman galley at the sea-fight of Sluys. The lonely old
woman, fierce and brooding like the falcon mewed in her chamber,
was soft only toward the lad whom she had brought up. All the
tenderness and love of her nature, so hidden from others that they
could not imagine their existence, were lavished upon him. She
could not bear him away from her, and he, with that respect for
authority which the age demanded, would not go without her
blessing and consent.

So it came about that Nigel, with his lion heart and with the
blood of a hundred soldiers thrilling in his veins, still at the
age of two and twenty, wasted the weary days reclaiming his hawks
with leash and lure or training the alans and spaniels who shared
with the family the big earthen-floored hall of the manor-house.

Day by day the aged Lady Ermyntrude had seen him wax in strength
and in manhood, small of stature, it is true, but with muscles of
steel--and a soul of fire. From all parts, from the warden of
Guildford Castle, from the tilt-yard of Farnham, tales of his