‘My lord calls her Goddess,’ said Guy, wistfully.  ’The title’s outlandish, and more the style of these foreigners but she may have it to-night, an she ’ll just keep the storm from shrouding her bright eye a matter of two hours.’

She rose with a boding lustre.  Drifts of thin pale upper-cloud leaned down ladders, pure as virgin silver, for her to climb to her highest seat on the unrebellious half-circle of heaven.

‘My mind’s made up!’ quoth Guy to the listening part of himself.  ’Out of this I’ll get.’

By the clearer ray he had discerned a narrow track running a white parallel with the general route.  At the expense of dislocating a mile of the cavalcade, he struck into it.  A dyke had to be taken, some heavy fallows crossed, and the way was straight before him.  He began to sneer at the slow jog-trot and absence of enterprise which made the fellows he had left shine so poorly in comparison with the Goshawk, but a sight of two cavaliers in advance checked his vanity, and now to overtake them he tasked his fat Flemish mare with unwonted pricks of the heel, that made her fling out and show more mettle than speed.

The objects of this fiery chase did not at first awake to a sense of being pursued.  Both rode with mantled visages, and appeared profoundly inattentive to the world outside their meditations.  But the Goshawk was not to be denied, and by dint of alternately roaring at them and upbraiding his two stumping beasts, he at last roused the younger of the cavaliers, who called to his companion loudly:  without effect it seemed, for he had to repeat the warning.  Guy was close up with them, when the youth exclaimed: 

’Father! holy father!  ‘Tis Sathanas in person!’

The other rose and pointed trembling to a dark point in the distance as he vociferated: 

‘Not here! not here; but yonder!’

Guy recognized the voice of the first speaker, and cried: 

‘Stay! halt a second!  Have you forgotten the Goshawk?’

‘Never!’ came the reply, ‘and forget not Farina!’

Spur and fleeter steeds carried them out of hearing ere Guy could throw in another syllable.  Farina gazed back on him remorsefully, but the Monk now rated his assistant with indignation.

’Thou weak one! nothing less than fool! to betray thy name on such an adventure as this to soul save the saints!’

Farina tossed back his locks, and held his forehead to the moon.  All the Monk’s ghostly wrath was foiled by the one little last sweet word of his beloved, which made music in his ears whenever annoyance sounded.

‘And herein,’ say the old writers, ’are lovers, who love truly, truly recompensed for their toils and pains; in that love, for which they suffer, is ever present to ward away suffering not sprung of love:  but the disloyal, who serve not love faithfully, are a race given over to whatso this base world can wreak upon them, without consolation or comfort of their mistress, Love; whom sacrificing not all to, they know not to delight in.’