So spoke the stout shepherd to Simon Bunce, pointing to the young man, who lay at his length upon the grass calculating the proportions of the stones that marked the relations of hours of the flood tide and those of the height of the moon.  Above and beyond was a sundial cut out in the turf, from his own observations after the hints that the hermit and the friar had given him.

‘Ha now, my lord, I have rare news for you.’

The unwonted title did not strike Hal’s unaccustomed ears, and he continued moving his lips, ‘High noon, spring tide.’

‘There, d’ye see?’ said Hob, ’he heeds nothing.  ’That I and my goodwife should have bred up a mooncalf!  Here, Hal, don’t you know Simon?  Hear his tidings!’

’Tidings enow!  King Henry is freed, King Edward is fled.  My Lord of Warwick has turned against him for good and all.  King Henry is proclaimed in all the market-places!  I heard it with my own ears at Penrith!’ And throwing up his cap into the air, while the example was followed by Hob, with ’God save King Henry, and you my Lord of Clifford.’

The sound was echoed by a burst of voices, and out of the brake suddenly stood the whole band of outlaws, headed by Giles Spearman, but Hal still stood like one dazed.  ’King Harry, the hermit, free and on his throne,’ he murmured, as one in a dream.

‘Ay, all things be upset and reversed,’ said Spearman, with a hand on his shoulder.  ‘No herd boy now, but my Lord of Clifford.’

‘Come to his kingdom,’ repeated Hal.  ’My own King Harry the hermit!  I would fain go and see him.’

‘So you shall, my brave youth, and carry him your homage and mine,’ said Spearman.  ’He will know me for poor Giles Musgrave, who upheld his standard in many a bloody field.  We will off to Sir Lancelot at Threlkeld now!  Spite of his policy of holes and corners, he will not now refuse to own you for what you are, aye, and fit you out as becomes a knight.’

‘God grant he may!’ muttered Bunce, ’without his hum and ha, and swaying this way and that, till he never moves at all!  Betwixt his caution, and this lad’s moonstruck ways, you have a fair course before you, Sir Giles!  See, what’s the lad doing now?’

The lad was putting into his pouch the larger white pebbles that had represented tens in his calculation, and murmuring the numbers they stood for.  ‘He will understand,’ he said almost to himself, but he showed himself ready to go with the party to Threlkeld, merely pausing at Hob’s cottage to pick up a few needful equipments.  In the skin of a rabbit, carefully prepared, and next wrapped in a silken kerchief, and kept under his chaff pillow, was the hermit’s portuary, which was carefully and silently transferred by Hal to his own bosom.  Sir Giles Musgrave objected to Watch, in city or camp, and Hal was obliged to leave him to Goodwife Dolly and to Piers.

With each it was a piteous parting, for Dolly had been as a mother to him for almost all his boyhood, and had supplied the tenderness that his mother’s fears and Sir Lancelot’s precautions had prevented his receiving at Threlkeld.  He was truly as a son to her, and she sobbed over him, declaring that she never would see him again, even if he came to his own, which she did not believe was possible, and who would see to his clean shirts?