The sight in question was a gallows, from which rotted, pendant, the corpse of an unhappy Englishman, hanged for killing a deer.

“If every oak in Aescendune woods bore such acorns, civilised folk might soon be happy.”

Wilfred uttered a deep malediction, which he could not suppress, and, leaving the party, disappeared from sight in the woods.

One of the Norman lads looked after him with some little appearance of sympathy, and when he had gone, said: 

“Is it like gentlemen to torment each other thus?”

“Not each other, certainly!”

“He is your brother in a way, the son of your stepmother, the lady of Aescendune.”

“He is in a way, but some brothers would be better out of the way than in it, besides—­why does he not show fight?  A Norman would with half the provocation.”

“You could not fight with him,” said Louis de Marmontier, who was the youngest of the pages who were learning “chivalry” at the castle of Aescendune, in company with Etienne and Wilfred, under the fostering care of the baron.

“I don’t know,” said the fierce young Norman, and, breaking off the conversation, switched savagely at the head of a thistle close at hand, which he neatly beheaded.

The others quite understood the action and the bitterness with which he spoke, for they knew that he considered himself defrauded of the lands of Aescendune by the arrangements Bishop Geoffrey had effected in favour of Wilfred.

Meanwhile, plunging into a thicket, and crossing a brook, Wilfred arrived by a shorter route first at the hall, and made his way to his mother’s bower, situated in a portion of the ancient building not yet destroyed, although doomed to make way for Norman improvements.

The lady of Aescendune sat lonely in her bower; her features were pale, and she seemed all too sad for one so highly born, and so good a friend to the suffering and the poor; her gaze was like that of one whose thoughts are far away—­perhaps they had strayed into Paradise in search of him whose loss was daily making earth more like a desert to her.

Wilfred came and stood beside her, and her hand played with his flowing hair until she felt that he was sobbing by her side.

“What is the matter, my dear boy?”

“Matter!  I cannot bear it any longer.  I must break the promise thou hast forced me to give.”

“Break thy promise, Wilfred?  What would thy sainted father say, did he hear thee?  And how dost thou know that he does not hear?”

“If he were here he would exact no such promise, I am sure; he would not at least make me appear as a coward in outlandish eyes, and cringe before these proud Frenchmen.”

Wilfred used the word Frenchmen with the greatest scorn.  He knew that the Normans scorned the name as much as they did the name Englishmen, of which their descendants lived to be so proud.

What was this promise which bound the poor lad as in a chain of iron?