’Oh! why did you not let me go with him?  I would have saved him, waited on him, fought for him.’

’Fine fighting—­when there’s no getting you to handle a lance, except as if you wanted to drive a puddock with a reed!  Though you have been better of late, little as your hermit seemed the man to teach you.’

’He said it was right and became a man!  Would I were with him!  He, my true King!  Let me go to him when you know where, good Simon.  I, that am his true and loving liegeman, should be with him.’

‘Ay! when you are a man to keep his head and your own.’

‘But I could wait on him.’

’Would you have us bested to take care of two instead of one, and my lady, moreover, in a pother about her son, and Sir Lancelot stirred to make a hue and cry all the more?  No, no, sir, bide in peace in the safe homestead where you are sheltered, and learn to be a man, minding your exercises as well as may be till the time shall come.’

’When I shall be a man and a knight, and do deeds of derring-do in his cause,’ cried Hal.

And the stimulus drove him on to continual calls to Hob, in Simon’s default, to jousts with sword or spear, represented generally by staves; and when these could not be had, he was making arrows and practising with them, so as to become a terror to the wild ducks and other neighbours on the wolds, the great geese and strange birds that came in from the sea in the cold weather.  When it was not possible to go far afield in the frosts and snows, he conned King Henry’s portuary, trying to identify the written words with those he knew by heart, and sometimes trying to trace the shapes of the letters on the snow with a stick; visiting, too, the mountains and looking into the limpid grey waters of the lakes, striving hard to guess why, when the sea rose in tides, they were still.  More than ever, too, did the starry skies fill him with contemplation and wonder, as he dwelt on the scraps alike of astronomy, astrology, and devotion which he had gathered from his oracle in the hermitage, and longed more and more for the time to return when he should again meet his teacher, his saint, and his King.

Alas! that time was never to come.  The outlawed partisans of the Red Rose had secret communications which spread intelligence rapidly throughout the country, and long before Sir Lancelot and his lady knew, and thus it was that Simon Bunce learnt, through the outlaws, that poor King Henry had been betrayed by treachery, and seized by John Talbot at Waddington Hall in Lancashire.  Deep were the curses that the outlaws uttered, and fierce were the threats against the Talbot if ever he should venture himself on the Cumbrian moors; and still hotter was their wrath, more bitter the tears of the shepherd lord, when the further tidings were received that the Earl of Warwick had brought the gentle, harmless prince, to whom he had repeatedly sworn fealty, into London with his feet tied to the stirrups of a sorry jade, and men crying before him, ‘Behold the traitor!’