"He has told me," said she, "that you have robbed the Church of God."

"Robbed him, it may be, an old hoody crow, against whom I have a grudge of
ten years' standing."

"Wretched, wretched boy! What wickedness next? Know you not, that he who
robs the Church robs God himself?"

"And he who harms God's people," put in the monk from behind the chair,
"harms his Maker."

"His Maker?" said the lad, with concentrated bitterness. "It would be a
gay world, if the Maker thereof were in any way like unto you, who call
yourselves his people. Do you remember who told them to set the peat-stack
on fire under me ten years ago? Ah, ha, Sir Monk, you forget that I have
been behind the screen,--that I have been a monk myself, or should have
been one, if my pious lady mother here had had her will of me, as she may
if she likes of that doll there at her knee. Do you forget why I left
Peterborough Abbey, when Winter and I turned all your priest's books
upside down in the choir, and they would have flogged us,--me, the Earl's
son,--me, the Viking's son,--me, the champion, as I will be yet, and make
all lands ring with the fame of my deeds, as they rung with the fame of my
forefathers, before they became the slaves of monks; and how when Winter
and I got hold of the kitchen spits, and up to the top of the peat-stack,
and held you all at bay there, a whole abbeyful of cowards there, against
two seven years' children? It was you bade set the peat-stack alight under
us, and so bring us down; and would have done it, too, had it not been for
my Uncle Brand, the only man that I care for in this wide world. Do you
think I have not owed you a grudge ever since that day, monk? And do you