from him violently, and all at once. There was neither clue, nor guide,
nor hope, and on each side of him yawned the hideous attraction of
despair. Even the recollections of a first love were veiled by what he
understood to be the irrevocable interdiction of the Church, and, in
his strongly spiritual mood, to think of Beatrix appeared to him like a
temptation to mortal sin.

In leaving England, without any definite aim, but with a vague
intention of making his way to Jerusalem, he had obeyed the Abbot of
Sheering rather than followed friendly advice, and his obedience had
savoured strongly of the monastic rule. Lambert de Clare, a man of the
world before he had become a churchman, and a man of heart before he
was a ruler of monks, had understood Gilbert's state well enough, and
had forced the best remedy upon him. The cure for a broken heart, if
there be any, is not in solitude and prayer, but in facing the wounds
and stings of the world's life; and the abbot had almost forcibly
thrust his young friend out to live like other men of his order, while
suggesting a pilgrimage to the Holy Land as a means of satisfying his
religious cravings. As for the material help which Gilbert had
received, it was no shame, in an age not sordid, for a penniless
gentleman to accept both gifts and money from a rich and powerful
person like the Abbot of Sheering, in the certainty of carving out such
fortune with his own hands as should enable him amply to repay the
loan. So far as his immediate destination was concerned, the abbot, who
considered his house to be vastly superior to political dissension, and
secretly laughed at his cousins for supporting King Stephen's upstart
cause, had advised Gilbert to make his way directly to the court of
Geoffrey Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy, and Grand Seneschal of France,
the husband of the Empress Maud, rightful Queen of England. Thither he
was riding, therefore, with Dunstan on his left hand, mounted upon his