"From the warmth of your panegyric, ghostly father," said the knight,
"I should almost suspect you were in love with the damsel."

"So I am," said the friar, "and I care not who knows it;
but all in the way of honesty, master soldier. I am,
as it were, her spiritual lover; and were she a damsel errant,
I would be her ghostly esquire, her friar militant.
I would buckle me in armour of proof, and the devil might thresh me
black with an iron flail, before I would knock under in her cause.
Though they be not yet one canonically, thanks to your soldiership,
the earl is her liege lord, and she is his liege lady.
I am her father confessor and ghostly director:
I have taken on me to show her the way to the next world;
and how can I do that if I lose sight of her in this? seeing
that this is but the road to the other, and has so many
circumvolutions and ramifications of byeways and beaten paths
(all more thickly set than the true one with finger-posts
and milestones, not one of which tells truth), that a traveller
has need of some one who knows the way, or the odds go hard
against him that he will ever see the face of Saint Peter."

"But there must surely be some reason," said Sir Ralph,
"for father Peter's apprehension."

"None," said brother Michael, "but the apprehension itself; fear being
its own father, and most prolific in self-propagation. The lady did,
it is true, once signalize her displeasure against our little brother,
for reprimanding her in that she would go hunting a-mornings instead
of attending matins. She cut short the thread of his eloquence by