“Sir Christopher dead,” he muttered to himself.  “I knew his grandfather when I was a lad, and my grandfather told me that he knew his grandfather’s great-grandfather—­say three hundred years of them—­and now I sit on the cold toes of the last of the lot, butchered like a mad ox in his own yard by a Spanish priest and his hirelings, to win his wife’s goods.  Oh! yes, it is wonderful, all very wonderful; and the Lady Cicely dead, burnt like a common witch.  And Emlyn dead—­Emlyn, whom I have hugged many a time in this very churchyard, before they whipped her into marrying that fat old grieve and made a monk of me.

“Well, I had her first kiss, and, by the saints! how she cursed old Stower all the way down yonder path.  I stood behind that tree and heard her.  She said he would die soon, and he did, and his brat with him.  She said she would dance on his grave, and she did; I saw her do it in the moonlight the night after he was buried; dressed in white she danced on his grave!  She always kept her promises, did Emlyn.  That’s her blood.  If her mother had not been a gypsy witch, she wouldn’t have married a Spaniard when every man in the place was after her for her beautiful eyes.  Emlyn is a witch too, or was, for they say she is dead; but I can’t think it, she isn’t the sort that dies.  Still, she must be dead, and that’s good for my soul.  Oh! miserable man, what are you thinking?  Get behind me, Satan, if you can find room.  A grave is no place for you, Satan, but I wish you were in it with me, Emlyn.  You must have been a witch, since, after you, I could never fancy any other woman, which is against nature, for all’s fish that comes to a man’s net.  Evidently a witch of the worst sort, but, my darling, witch or no I wish you weren’t dead, and I’ll break that Abbot’s neck for you yet, if it costs me my soul.  Oh!  Emlyn, my darling, my darling, do you remember how we kissed in the copse by the river?  Never was there a woman who could love like you.”

So he moaned on, rocking himself to and fro on the legs of the corpse, till at length a wild ray from the red, risen sun crept into the darksome hole, lighting first of all upon a mouldering skull which Bolle had thrown back among the soil.  He rose up and pitched it out with a word that should not have passed the lips of a lay-brother, even as such thoughts should not have passed his mind.  Then he set himself to a task which he had planned in the intervals of his amorous meditations—­a somewhat grizzly task.

Drawing his knife from its sheath, he cut the rough stitching of the grave-clothes, and, with numb hands, dragged them away from the body’s head.

The light went out behind a cloud, but, not to waste time, he began to feel the face.

“Sir Christopher’s nose wasn’t broken,” he muttered to himself, “unless it were in that last fray, and then the bone would be loose, and this is stiff.  No, no, he had a very pretty nose.”