Raymond could have found in his heart to wish that the limit had not been quite so quickly reached, and that the hapless women and children had not been left to perish miserably in the sight of the warmth and plenty of the English camp; but he would not say more to damp his brother’s happiness in their reunion, nor in that almost greater joy with which Roger received him back.

“In faith,” laughed Gaston, “I believe that some of the wizard’s art cleaves yet to yon boy, for he has been restless and dreamy and unlike himself these many days; and when I have asked him what ailed him, his answer was ever the same, that he knew you were drawing nigh; and verily he has proved right, little as I believed him when he spoke of it.”

Roger had so grown and improved that Raymond would scarce have recognized in him the pale shrinking boy they had borne out from the house of the sorcerer three years before.  He had developed rapidly after the first year of his new life, when the shackles of his former captivity seemed finally broken; but this last year of regular soldier’s employment had produced a more marked change in his outward man than those spent in the Brotherhood or at Raymond’s side.  His figure had widened.  He carried himself well, and with an air of fearless alertness.  He was well trained in martial exercises, and the hot suns of France had bronzed his cheeks, and given them a healthy glow of life and animation.  He still retained much of his boyish beauty, but the dreaminess and far-away vacancy had almost entirely left his eyes.  Now and again the old listening look would creep into them, and he would seem for a few moments to be lost to outward impressions; but if recalled at such moments from his brief lapse, and questioned as to what he was thinking, it always proved to be of Raymond, not of his old master.

Once or twice he had told Gaston that his brother was in peril —­ of what kind he knew not; and Gaston had wondered if indeed this had been so.  One of these occasions had been just before Christmastide, and the date being thus fixed in his mind, he asked his brother if he had been at that time exposed to any peril.  Raymond could remember nothing save the vindictive threat of Peter Sanghurst, and Gaston was scarce disposed to put much faith in words, either good or bad, uttered by such a man as that.

And now things began to press towards a climax in this memorable siege.  The French King, awakened from his long and inexplicable lethargy by the entreaties of his starving subjects so bravely holding the town for a pusillanimous master, and stung by the taunts of the English King, had mustered an army, and was now marching to the relief of the town.  It was upon the last day of July, when public excitement was running high, and all men were talking and thinking of an approaching battle, that word was brought into the camp, and eagerly passed from mouth to mouth, to the effect that the King of France had despatched certain messengers to hold parley with the royal Edward, and that they were even now being admitted to the camp by the bridge of Nieulay —­ the only approach to Calais through the marshes on the northeast, which had been closely guarded by the English throughout the siege.