As has before been said, Roger the woodman’s son was carried into the bare but spotlessly clean room upon the upper floor of the building which was used for any of the sick of the community, and John was laid in another of the narrow pallet beds, of which there were four in that place.  All this while Roger lay as if dead, in a trance that might be one simply of exhaustion, or might be that strange sleep into which the old sorcerer had for years been accustomed to throw him at will.  Leaving him thus passive and apparently lifeless (save that the heart’s action was distinctly perceptible), Father Paul busied himself over poor John, who was found to be in pitiable plight; for his wound had opened with the exertion of the long ride, and he had lost much blood before any one knew the state he was in.  For some short time his case was somewhat critical, as the bleeding proved obstinate, and was checked with difficulty; and but for Father Paul’s accurate knowledge of surgery (accurate for the times he lived in, at any rate), he would likely enough have bled to death even as he lay.

Then whilst the kindly monks were bending over him, and Father Paul’s entire time and attention were given up to the case before him, so that he dared not leave John’s bedside for an instant, Roger suddenly uttered a wild cry and sprang up in his bed, his lips parted, his eyes wide open and fixed in a dreadful stare.

“I come!  I come!” he cried, in a strange, muffled voice; and with a rapidity and energy of which no one would have believed him capable who had seen him lifted from the horse an hour before, he rose and strove to push aside his father’s detaining hand.

The old man uttered a bitter cry, and flung his arms about the boy.

“It has come! it has come!  I knew it would.  There is no hope, none!  He is theirs, body and soul.  He will go back to them, and they will —­”

The words were drowned in a wild cry, as the boy struggled so fiercely that it was plain even the old man’s frenzied strength would not suffice to detain him long.  Father Paul and the monk who was assisting him with John could not move without allowing the bleeding to recommence.  But Raymond was standing by disengaged, and the keen eyes of the Father fixed themselves upon his face.  He had heard a brief sketch of the rescue of Roger as the boy had been undressed and laid in the bed, and now he said, in accents of quiet command,

“Take the crucifix that hangs at my girdle, and lay it upon his brow.  Bid him lie down once again —­ adjure him in the name of the Holy Jesus.  It is not earthly force that will prevail here.  We may save him but by the Name that is above every name.  Go!”

Again over Raymond’s senses there stole that sense of mystic unreality, or to speak more truly, the sense of the reality of the unseen over the seen things about and around us that men call mysticism, but which may be something widely different; and with it came that quickening of the faculties that he had experienced before as he had knelt in the sorcerer’s unhallowed hall, the same sense of fearlessness and power.  He took the crucifix without a word, and went straight to the frenzied boy, struggling wildly against the detaining clasp of his father’s arms.