I took the letter idly and went to my stables with it in my hand, and opened and read it as I walked.

“To Oswald, son of Owen.—­It is not good to sleep in the moonlight.”

That was all it said, and there was no name at the end of it.  I thought it foolish enough, for every one knows that the cold white light of the moon is held to be harmful for sleepers in the open air.  But I was not in the way of sleeping out in this early season with its cold, though, of course, it was always possible that one might be belated on the hills and have to make a night in the heather of it when hunting on Exmoor or the Brendons.  There was not much moon left now, either.

So I showed the note to Owen presently, and he puzzled over it, seeing that it could not have been sent for nothing.  At last we both thought that whoever wrote it, or had it written, knew that some attack would be made on us with the next moon, when it would be likely that we might be riding homeward by its light with no care against foes.  That might well be called “sleeping in the moonlight” as things were; and at all events we were warned in time.  The trouble to me was that it seemed to say that danger was not all past.

However, when there was no moon at all I forgot the letter for the time, no more trouble cropping up, and but for a chance word I think that it had not come into my mind again until we were out in the moonlight at some time.  As we sat at table one evening when the moon was almost at the full again, some one spoke of moonstruck men, and that minded me, and set me thinking.  He said that once he himself had had a sore pain in the face by reason of the moonlight falling on it when he was asleep, and another told somewhat the same, until the talk drifted away to other things and they forgot it.  But now I remembered how that at our first coming here I had waked in the early hours and seen a patch of moonlight from a high southern window on the outer wall of the palace passing across Owen’s breast as he slept.  Then I was on the floor across the door, but now I slept in the same place that Owen had that night, while he was on the couch across the room and under the window.  It was possible, therefore, that the light did fall on my face, but I was pretty sure that if so it would have waked me.

At all events, if the letter had aught to do with that, it was a cumbrous way of letting me know that my bed was in a bad place for quiet sleep.  The only thing that seemed likely thus was that the good priest who wrote had left the palace before he had remembered to tell me how he had fared in that room once, and so sent back word.  There were many priests backward and forward here, as at Glastonbury with Ina.  Then it seemed plain that this was the meaning of the whole thing, and so I would hang a cloak over the window by and by.

And, of course, having settled the question in my own mind, I forgot to do that, and was like to have paid dearly for forgetting.