THE CORNER THAT HELD THEM

Two horses were standing at the side of the causeway, nose to tail, pressed together for warmth. As she ran by one of them pricked its ears and neighed, and a moment later they both came trotting after her. For a quarter-mile or so they kept up with her. Then they stopped, their curiosity at an end, and she ran on alone.

There was an old furred cloak, it had belonged to Dame Alicia de Foley, which had long lain as an extra wadding under the cushions of the present prioress. She pulled it out; and out with it came a complicated smell, compounded of wildcat, old spices, and fleabane. As she put on the cloak it seemed to her that she was creeping for warmth and shelter into the skirts of the old prioress as she had done when she was a child. She saw the old woman's hand, dry and waxen-white, with the ring that fitted so loosely that it was always slipping round, the light of its jewel shining inward on the palm, and felt herself dutifully turning it right way about again. It was there, it was gone. A brand broke on the hearth, the shadows of the room were remade with a new shape, peaked and wolfish. It was her own hooded shadow she saw but she did not stay to recognise it.

Though he remembered everything to do with Dame Lilias and was full of good will, nothing developed from the good will but more good will, and speculations as to the view Dame Lilias would have from her slot window and if the angels, which in a marish country are winged like herons, might not be winged like pigeons in a more comfortable type of landscape.

For each one of us lives in his microcosm, the solidity of this world is a mere game of mirrors, there can be no absolute existence for what is apprehended differently by all.

She paused, watching this arrow sink in. Like an animal that runs wild as it smells the blood of its quarry she showed her teeth and cried out savagely...

In that time when so many priests died and others hid themselves in routine, the sickly diffident Walter Dunford became known as a man almost angelical in energy. He ministered, he comforted, he organised. Respectable witnesses averred that he had been present, at one and the same time, beside a death-bed and at the altar. Some had felt healing flow from his fingers with the holy oil, others had seen him, whilst running to catch the confession of a dying outlaw, caught up by his zeal as if on wings, and wafted across the empty market-place like a bird. In the year 1351 many people were saying that Walter Dunford was a saint.

In the days of the old prioress the singing had been elegant, reedy, almost insubstantial, like the notes of water-birds secluded in some distant mere. In the time of Prioress Johanna it had grown ragged and strident. Now the tone was full and saccharine, the cadences were reposed on as though they were cushions, and Dame Alice executed the ornaments exactly as she executed the marshmallow roses on her sweetmeats: a whisk, a twirl, a tapering, and there you were! He had looked forward to the reign of Dame Matilda.

She looked the worse being paired with the newly-made Dame Adela - grown so beautiful a girl that her parents had tried to snatch her back into the world. She had been willing enough to go with them, chattering about how she would wear a dress of white satin and ride horse with blue harness, and hunt with a pack of white hounds, each hound to be trimmed with bells and blue ribbons. Perhaps it was her chatter which in the end made her parents decide that God should keep her: too beautiful for the cloister, she was too silly to be safely invested in the world. She was, indeed, almost an idiot; but in the convent no one quite said so. At the most, it was said that Lovisa, poor little crooked thing, had wits enough for two. Only Lovisa loved Adela, loved her seriously and with- out delight. Only Lovisa was indignant when Dame Alicia suddenly turned against her pet and boxed Adela's small ears, crying out furiously: 'Zany, zany, zany! Would to God I had never set eyes on you!'

Now the bishop was reading Dame Isabel's document for himself. He was a handsome man in a sheeplike, saintlike way, and the attitude of study became him because it concealed the fact that he squinted. He read carefully and attentively, without a vestige of expression.

He spoke to his two falcons. 'Now you are going to live in a convent and become two holy nuns.' Their demeanor was so composed, they were so gentle and dignified, that he was constrained to add: 'God forbid it!'

'I will not go beyond a sparrow-hawk.' He had been saying this to himself ever since the conversation with Brother Baltazar, but handling the birds, seeing the love-lorn way they tilted their heads and poked with their wings, he forgot all prudence. Come what might, cost what it might, he must have a tiercel. While he

Riding out with his hawk Sir Ralph began to have a hawk eye view of his world. The river ceased to be a fisherman's river a rosary of pools and shallows; from the back of the dun horse he saw it as a progress, winding like some wasteful history, with here and there the record of a forsaken channel, such as a row of alders sulking in a hollow, or a long ribbon of rushes. He began to see the shape of the hamlet, too, and how cunningly the hovels had been plastered to any shelter against the prevailing wind.

Among all these losses she brooded over yet another loss, in the common estimation the loss of least account, the lost Adela. The wind had changed, it blew from the south-west, and brought a rainy thaw. A white mist like steam from a cauldron billowed round the house. Out of this uncertain daylight the daylight owl hooted: hearing it she was transfixed with a hope as agonising as if a sword had been thrust between her ribs. Adela had come back! But it was only the owl. Adela was gone, in her last hours cuffed and abused and overlooked. Reduced to foolishness by her grief Dame Lovisa told herself that Adela had run away because of wounded feelings.

The fears of the half-witted drive them towards what they dread. As the rabbit runs towards the weasel, and the mouse presses itself to the cat's flank...