The Lady Goda's left hand had been pressed to her heart as though she
were in fear and pain; but as her son spoke, it fell by her side, and
her face grew calm before she remembered that it should grow sad. Until
to-day her son had been in her eyes but a child, subject to his father,
subject to herself, subject to the old manor-priest who had taught him
the little he knew. Now, on a sudden, he was full-grown and strong;
more than that, he was master in his father's place, and at a word from
him, men-at-arms and bondsmen would have gone forth on the instant to
slay the man she loved, and to burn and to harry all that was his. She
was grateful to him for not having spoken that word; and since Gilbert
meant to meet Curboil in a single combat, she felt no fear for her
lover, the most skilled man at fence in all Essex and Hertfordshire,
and she felt sure, likewise, that for his reputation as a knight he
would not kill a youth but half his age.

While she was thinking of these things, the monks had begun to chant
again; the confusion was ended in the courtyard; the squires took up
the bier, and the procession moved slowly across the broad paved space
to the chapel opposite the main gate.

An hour later Sir Raymond's dead body lay before the altar, whereon
burned many waxen tapers. Alone, upon the lowest step, Gilbert was
kneeling, with joined hands and uplifted eyes, motionless as a statue.
He had taken the long sword from the dead man's breast, and had set it
up against the altar, straight and bare. It was hacked at the edges,
and there were dark stains upon it from its master's last day's work.
In the simple faith of a bloody age, Gilbert Warde was vowing, by all
that he and his held sacred, before God's altar, upon God's Sacred
Body, upon his father's unburied corpse, that before the blade should