"Strike thee! strike thee! Did he strike thee?" cried Sir Cesar, his small black eyes glowing like red-hot coals, and twinkling like stars on a frosty night. "Sure he did not dare to strike thee?" "He felled him, Sir Cesar," cried the old woman, whose tongue could refrain no longer; "he felled him to the ground. He, a child I have had upon my knee, felled old Richard Heartley with a heavy blow!" "My curse upon him!" cried the old knight, while anger and indignation gave to his features an expression almost sublime; "my curse upon him! May he wither heart and limb like a blasted oak! like it, may he be dry and sapless, when all is sunshine and summer, without a green leaf to cover the nakedness of his misery; without flower or fruit may he pass away, and fire consume the rottenness of his core!" "Oh! your worship, curse him not so deeply; we know how heavy your curses fall, and he has had some payment already," said the old cottager: "this honourable gentleman heard my housewife cry, and came riding up. So, when he saw the clumsy coward strike a feeble old man like me, he takes him up by the jerkin and the slops, and casts him as clean over the wall on the heath as I've seen Hob Johnson cast a truss out of a hay-cart." "Sir Osborne, you did well," said the old knight; "you acted like your race. But yet I could have wished that this had not happened; 'twould have been better that your coming had not been known to your enemies before your friends, which I fear me will now be the case. He with whom you have to do is one from whose keen eye nought passes without question. The fly may as well find its way through the spider's web, without wakening the crafty artist of the snare, as one on whom that man has fixed his eye may stir a step without his knowing it. But there is one who sees more deeply than even he does." "Yourself, of course," replied Sir Osborne; "and indeed I cannot doubt that it is so; for I sit here in mute astonishment to find that all I held most secret is as much known to you as to myself." "Oh, this is all simplicity!" replied the old man; "these are no wonders, though I may teach you some hereafter. At present I will tell you the future, against which you must guard, for your fortune is a-making." "But if our fate be fixed," said Sir Osborne, "so that even mortal eyes can see it in the stars, prudence and caution, wisdom and action, are in vain; for how can we avoid what is certainly to be?"