sense of obligation, as he began to find out how, again and again, in
the turning tides of civil strife, his neighbour, though of opposite
conviction, served him by protecting his bondsmen, his neat cattle, and
his growing crops from pillage and destruction. Raymond did not trace
such acts of neighbourly kindness to the day when, hawking with his
lady and little Gilbert, then hardly big enough to sit upon a horse,
they had been overtaken by a winter storm not far from Arnold's lands,
and when Arnold himself, returning from a journey, had bidden them take
shelter in a small outlying manor house, where he was to spend the
night, and whither his servants had brought his little daughter Beatrix
to meet her father. Raymond had accepted the offer for his wife's sake,
and the two families had made acquaintance on that evening, by the
blazing fire in the little hall.

Before supper, the men had talked together with that sort of cheery
confidence which exists almost before the first meeting between men who
are neighbours and of the same rank, and the Lady Goda had put in a
word now and then, as she sat in the high-backed chair, drying the
bright blue cloth skirt of her gown before the crackling logs; and
meanwhile, too, young Gilbert, who had his mother's hair and his
father's deep-set eyes, walked round and round the solemn little dark-
faced girl, who sat upon a settle by herself, clad in a green cloth
dress which was cut in the fashion for grown-up women, and having two
short stiff plaits of black hair hanging down behind the small
coverchief that was tied under her fat chin. And as the boy in his
scarlet doublet and green cloth hose walked backward and forward,
stopping, moving away, then standing still to show off his small
hunting-knife, drawing it half out of its sheath, and driving it home
again with a smart push of the palm of his hand, the little girl's
round black eyes followed all his movements with silent and grave