He approached eagerly.  Yes, it was Louis; but he did not stir.  Etienne dismounted and discovered the fact he had already anticipated:  his young companion was dead:  an arrow, evidently shot close at hand, had pierced his chest.  The poor lad had but slight defensive armour—­a light cuirass thrown on at the first alarm.

He had fallen and been left for dead, but had evidently afterwards dragged himself to the brook, in the agony of thirst, and had died while attempting to drink.

They placed the body reverently on the moss at the foot of the tree, and for a time were silent.  The remembrance of his activity and gaiety on the previous day, and of his sweet minstrelsy on the very eve of his voice being hushed for ever, came sadly to their minds.  At length Etienne broke the silence.

“Draw forth the arrow,” he said.

They drew it forth and gave it him, bloodstained as it was:  he looked closely upon it.

“This is an arrow from the same quiver as that which killed Gislebert; it is of English make, such as those clumsy louts use.”

It was indeed a heavy, broad shaft, quite unlike the slender, tapering arrows of Norman workmanship, adapted for a long flight, in days when a furlong was considered a boy’s distance.

“Our own serfs turn upon us.  Well, they will rue it ere long; a short shrift and a long rope will be their portion.”

“Ah!  I remember noticing such in the quiver of the young thrall Eadwin,” said Pierre—­“he whose hand you sought to cut off for poaching.”

They said no more on that occasion, but pursued in silence the train of thought suggested.

It was a strange gathering that night at the castle; for corpse after corpse was borne in from the woods to receive Christian burial at the priory, all killed by arrows, and those arrows—­which the slayers had not troubled to remove, as if they disdained reprisals—­all of the clumsy sort used by the “aborigines”

CHAPTER IX.  A HUNT IN THE WOODS.

The winter of the year 1068 was setting in with great severity, sharp winds from the north and east had already stripped the faded leaves from the trees of the forest, and the heavens were frequently veiled by dark masses of cloud, from whence fast-falling snow ever and anon descended.

The winter opened drearily for the inhabitants of Aescendune, for the “mystery of the forest” was yet unsolved; none knew whence those incendiaries had issued who had given Yew Farm, with all its inmates, to the vengeful flames; but that this latter conflagration was in some way connected with the earlier destruction of St. Wilfred’s Priory seemed not unlikely to most men.

Hugo de Malville cum Aescendune was not the man to sit calmly on the battlements of his newly-built towers and survey the destruction of his property, although he was not free from a terrible dread that his sins were finding him out, at which times he was like a haunted man who sees spectres, invisible to the world around.