“Now when we had come to ourselves again, old Geoffrey, who was now naught but glad, spake and said:  ’It is told amongst us that when our host departed from the Land of the Tower, after thou hadst taken thy due seat upon the throne, that thou didst promise our chieftains how thou wouldst one day come back to the fellowship of the Dry Tree and dwell amongst us.  Wilt thou now hold to thy promise?’ I said:  ’O Geoffrey, if thou art the last of those seekers, and thou wert but a boy when I dwelt with you of old, who of the Dry Tree is left to remember me?’ He hung his head awhile then, and spake:  ’Old are we grown, yet art thou fittest to be amongst young folk:  unless mine eyes are beguiled by some semblance which will pass away presently.’  ‘Nay,’ quoth I, ’it is not so; as I am now, so shall I be for many and many a day.’  ‘Well,’ said Geoffrey, ’wherever thou mayst be, thou shalt be Queen of men.’

“‘I list not to be Queen again,’ said I. He laughed and said:  ‘I wot not how thou mayst help it.’

“I said:  ’Tell me of the Dry Tree, how the champions have sped, and have they grown greater or less.’  Said he:  ’They are warriors and champions from father to son; therefore have they thriven not over well; yet they have left the thick of the wood, and built them a great castle above the little town hight Hampton; so that is now called Hampton under Scaur, for upon the height of the said Scaur is our castle builded:  and there we hold us against the Burg of the Four Friths which hath thriven greatly; there is none so great as the Burg in all the lands about.’

“I said:  ‘And the Land of the Tower, thriveth the folk thereof at all?’ ‘Nay,’ he said, ’they have been rent to pieces by folly and war and greediness:  in the Great City are but few people, grass grows in its streets; the merchants wend not the ways that lead thither.  Naught thriveth there since thou stolest thyself away from them.’

“‘Nay,’ I said, ’I fled from their malice, lest I should have been brought out to be burned once more; and there would have been none to rescue then.’  ‘Was it so?’ said old Geoffrey; ‘well it is all one now; their day is done.’

“‘Well,’ I said, ’come into my house, and eat and drink therein and sleep here to-night, and to-morrow I shall tell thee what I will do.’

“Even so they did; and on the morrow early I spake to Geoffrey and said:  ’What hath befallen the Land of Abundance, and the castle my lord built for me there; which we held as our refuge all through the War of the Tower, both before we joined us to you in the wildwood, and afterwards?’ He said:  ’It is at peace still; no one hath laid hand on it; there is a simple folk dwelling there in the clearing of the wood, which forgetteth thee not; though forsooth strange tales are told of thee there; and the old men deem that it is but a little since thou hast ceased to come and go there; and they are ready to worship thee as somewhat more than the Blessed Saints, were it not for the Fathers of the Thorn who are their masters.’