gone away I wept a little on her grave.

The rest of that day I spent making ready for my journey. As it chanced
when the house was burnt the outbuildings which lay on the farther side
of the yard behind escaped the fire, and in the stable were two good
horses, one a grey riding-gelding and the other a mare that used to drag
the nets to the quay and bring back the fish, which horses, although
frightened and alarmed, were unharmed. Also there was a quantity of
stores, nets, salt, dried fish in barrels, and I know not what besides.
The horses I kept, but all the rest of the gear, together with the
premises, the ground on which the house had stood, and the other
property I made over to William, my man, who promised me to pay me their
value when he could earn it in better times.

Next morning I rode away for London upon the grey horse, loading the
armour of the knight I had killed and such other possessions as remained
to me upon the mare which I led with a rope. Save William there was none
to say me good-bye, for the misery in Hastings was so great that all
were concerned with their own affairs or in mourning their dead. I
was not sorry that it fell out thus, since I was so full of sadness at
leaving the place where I was born and had lived all my life, that I
think I should have shed tears if any who had been my friends had spoken
kind words to me, which would have been unmanly. Never had I felt
so lonely as when from the high ground I gazed back to the ruins of
Hastings over which still hung a thin pall of smoke. My courage seemed
to fail me altogether; I looked forward to the future with fear,
believing that I had been born unlucky, that it held no good for me
who probably should end my days as a common soldier or a fisherman, or
mayhap in prison or on the gallows. From childhood I had suffered these
fits of gloom, but as yet this was the blackest of them that I had