I thank your Grace for the promise of the wide English lands of which I spoke to you, and the title that goes with them.  These I will do my best to earn, nor will I ask for them till I kneel before you when you are crowned King of England at Westminster, as I doubt not God will bring about before this year is out.  I have made a map of the road by which your army should march on London after landing, and of the towns to be sacked upon the way thither.  This, however, I keep, since although not one in ten thousand of these English swine can read French, or any other tongue, should it chance to be lost, all can understand a map.  Not that there is any fear of loss, for who will meddle with a priest who carries credentials signed by his Holiness himself.

I do homage to your Grace.  This written with my hand from Blythburgh, in Suffolk, on the twentieth day of February, 1346.

Edmund of Noyon.

Father Arnold ceased reading, and Hugh gasped out: 

“What a fool is this knave-Count!”

“Most men are, my son, in this way or in that, and the few wise profit by their folly.  Thus this letter, which he thought so safe, will save England to Edward and his race, you from many dangers, your betrothed from a marriage which she hates—­that is, if you can get safe away with it from Dunwich.”

“Where to, Father?”

“To King Edward in London, with another that I will write for you ere the dawn.”

“But is it safe, Father, to trust so precious a thing to me, who have bitter enemies awaiting me, and may as like as not be crow’s meat by to-morrow?”

Father Arnold looked at him with his soft and dreamy eyes, then said: 

“I think the crow’s not hatched that will pick your bones, Hugh, though at the last there be crows, or worms, for all of us.”

“Why not, Father?  Doubtless, this morning young John of Clavering thought as much, and now he is in the stake-nets, or food for fishes.”

“Would you like to hear, Hugh, and will you keep it to yourself, even from Eve?”

“Ay, that I would and will.”

“He’ll think me mad!” muttered the old priest to himself, then went on aloud as one who takes a sudden resolution.  “Well, I’ll tell you, leaving you to make what you will of a story that till now has been heard by no living man.”

“Far in the East is the great country that we call Cathay, though in truth it has many other names, and I alone of all who breathe in England have visited that land.”

“How did you get there?” asked Hugh, amazed, for though he knew dimly that Father Arnold had travelled much in his youth, he never dreamed that he had reached the mystic territories of Cathay, or indeed that such a place really was except in fable.

“It would take from now till morning to tell, son, nor even then would you understand the road.  It is enough to say that I went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where our blessed Saviour died.  That was the beginning.  Thence I travelled with Arabs to the Red Sea, where wild men made a slave of me, and we were blown across the Indian Ocean to a beauteous island named Ceylon, in which all the folk are black.