“Name of God! is it so?” said Cicely, springing up; “and the most of the men are away!  I cannot hold the Hall against that foreign Abbot and his hirelings, and an orphaned heiress is but a chattel to be sold.  Oh! now I understand what my father meant.  Order horses.  I’ll off to Christopher.  Yet, stay, Nurse.  What will he do with me?  It may seem shameless, and will vex him.”

“I think he will marry you.  I think to-night you will be a wife.  If not, I’ll know the reason why,” she added viciously.

“A wife!  To-night!” exclaimed the girl, turning crimson to her hair.  “And my father but just dead!  How can it be?”

“We’ll talk of that with Harflete.  Mayhap, like you, he’ll wish to wait and ask the banns, or to lay the case before a London lawyer.  Meanwhile, I have ordered horses and sent a message to the Abbot to say you come to learn the meaning of these rumours, which will keep him still till nightfall; and another to Cranwell Towers, that we may find food and lodging there.  Quick, now, and get your cloak and hood.  I have the jewels in their case, for Maldon seeks them more even than your lands, and with them all the money I can find.  Also I have bid the sewing-girl make a pack of some garments.  Come now, come, for that Abbot is hungry and will be stirring.  There is no time for talk.”

Three hours later in the red glow of the sunset Christopher Harflete, watching at his door, saw two women riding towards him across the snow, and knew them while they were yet far off.

“It is true, then,” he said to Father Roger Necton, the old clergyman of Cranwell, whom he had summoned from the vicarage.  “I thought that fool of a messenger must be drunk.  What can have chanced, Father?”

“Death, I think, my son, for sure naught else would bring the Lady Cicely here unaccompanied save by a waiting-woman.  The question is—­what will happen now?” and he glanced sideways at him.

“I know well if I can get my way,” answered Christopher, with a merry laugh.  “Say now, Father, if it should so be that this lady were willing, could you marry us?”

“Without a doubt, my son, with the consent of the parents;” and again he looked at him.

“And if there were no parents?”

“Then with the consent of the guardian, the bride being under age.”

“And if no guardian had been declared or admitted?”

“Then such a marriage duly solemnized, being a sacrament of the Church, would hold fast until the crack of doom unless the Pope annulled it, and, as you know, the Pope is out of favour in this realm on this very matter of marriage.  Let me explain the law to you, ecclesiastic and civil——­”

But Christopher was already running towards the gate, so the old parson’s lecture remained undelivered.

The two met in the snow, Emlyn Stower riding on ahead and leaving them together.

“What is it, sweetest?” he asked.  “What is it?”