now,’ whereat the roof flew off, and a great yellow dragon came down on the chapel-floor with a flop, and danced about clumsily, wriggling his fat tail, and saying to a sort of tune, ’O the Devil, the Devil, the Devil, O the Devil,’ so I went up to him, and put my hand on his breast, meaning to slay him, and so awoke, and found myself standing up with my hand on the breast of an armed knight; the door lay flat on the ground, and under it lay Hector, our dog, whining and dying.

For eight hours I had been asleep; on awaking, the blood rushed up into my face, I heard my mother’s low mysterious song behind me, and knew not what harm might happen to her and me, if that knight’s coming made her cease in it; so I struck him with my left hand, where his face was bare under his mail-coif, and getting my sword in my light hand, drove its point under his hawberk, so that it came out behind, and he fell, turned over on his face, and died.

Then, because my mother still went on working and singing, I said no word, but let him lie there, and put the door up again, and found Hector dead.

I then sat down again and polished my sword with a piece of leather after I had wiped the blood from it; and in an hour my mother arose from her work, and raising me from where I was sitting, kissed my brow, saying, ’Well done, Lionel, you have slain our greatest foe, and now the people will know you for what you are before you die—­Ah God! though not before I die.’

So I said, ’Who is he, mother? he seems to be some Lord; am I a Lord then?’

‘A King, if the people will but know it,’ she said.

Then she knelt down by the dead body, turned it round again, so that it lay face uppermost, as before, then said: 

’And so it has all come to this, has it?  To think that you should run on my son’s sword-point at last, after all the wrong you have done me and mine; now must I work carefully, least when you are dead you should still do me harm, for that you are a King—­Lionel!’

‘Yea, Mother.’

’Come here and see; this is what I have wrought these many Peter’s days by day, and often other times by night.’

‘It is a surcoat, Mother; for me?’

‘Yea, but take a spade, and come into the wood.’

So we went, and my mother gazed about her for a while as if she were looking for something, but then suddenly went forward with her eyes on the ground, and she said to me: 

’Is it not strange, that I who know the very place I am going to take you to, as well as our own garden, should have a sudden fear come over me that I should not find it after all; though for these nineteen years I have watched the trees change and change all about it—­ah! here, stop now.’

We stopped before a great oak; a beech tree was behind us—­she said, ‘Dig, Lionel, hereabouts.’

So I dug and for an hour found nothing but beech roots, while my mother seemed as if she were going mad, sometimes running about muttering to herself, sometimes stooping into the hole and howling, sometimes throwing herself on the grass and twisting her hands together above her head; she went once down the hill to a pool that had filled an old gravel pit, and came back dripping and with wild eyes; ‘I am too hot,’ she said, ’far too hot this St. Peter’s day.’