ceased speaking, and then sank back against the wall behind him with
something between a groan and a sigh. One word had struck the ground
from under his feet; the next was to pierce his soul.

"Who is her husband?" he asked under his breath.

Before the abbot answered, his grasp tightened upon Gilbert's hands
with a friendly grip that was meant to inspire courage.

"Your mother has married Sir Arnold de Curboil."

Gilbert sprang to his feet, as though he had been struck in the face by
an enemy. A moment earlier he could not have risen without help; a
moment later he fell backward into the abbot's arms.

Nothing that he had felt in his whole short life--not all the joys and
fears of childhood, which, after all, contains the greatest joys and
fears in life, compounded with the clash of his first fighting day and
the shock of seeing his father killed before his eyes--not all these
together could be compared with what he felt at that plain statement of
the dishonour done upon his house and upon his father's memory. Yet he
was not unconscious.

"Now, by the Sacred Blood--"

Before he could pronounce the solemn vow of revenge that was on his
lips, the abbot's delicate hand was almost crushing his mouth with open
palm to stop the words.

"Arnold de Curboil, perjured to God, false to his king, the murderer of