there was with him, too, a dark-skinned youth of his own age, a
foundling, christened Dunstan by the monks after a saint of their
order, brought up and taught at the abbey, who seemed to know neither
whose child he was nor whence he came, but could by no means be induced
to enter the novitiate so long as the world had room for wanderers and
adventurers. He was a gifted fellow, quick to learn and tenacious to
remember, speaking Latin and Norman French and English Saxon as well as
any monk in the abbey, quick of hand and light of foot, with daring
black eyes in which the pupils could hardly be found, while the whites
were of a cold, blue grey and often bloodshot; and he had short,
straight black hair, and a face that made one think of a young falcon.
He had begged so hard to be allowed to go with Gilbert, and it was so
evident that he was not born to wear out a church pavement with his
knees, that the abbot had given his consent. During the last weeks
before Gilbert's departure, when he was hourly gaining strength and
could no longer bear to be shut up within the walls of the convent, he
had made a companion of Dunstan, walking and riding with him, for the
fellow could ride, and sometimes entering into long arguments with him
about matters of belief and conscience and honour, and the two had
become attached to each other by their unlikeness; not precisely as
friends and equals, yet by no means as master and man; it was rather
the sort of relation which often existed between knight and squire,
though the two were of the same age, and though Gilbert had no
immediate prospect of winning knightly spurs.

It would have been hard, however, to admit that Dunstan could ever
develop into a knight himself. There were strange little blanks in his
ideas of chivalry, curious, unfeeling spots in his moral organization,
which indicated another race, another inheritance of thought, the
traditions of a world older and less simple than the one in which