After standing a little longer, he wiped his sword and slapped it home in the sheath; unlaced and flung away the pieces of his helmet; and at length, kneeling on one knee beside the burly corpse, he cut open with his dagger the front of the doublet. A broad gold chain and locket were revealed, the sight whereof caused Sir Brian's lean visage to wrinkle itself painfully. He took up the locket, sticky as it was with blood, and opened it. It contained, not the lock of crisp black hair that he had put in it ten years ago, but a soft brown coil of a woman's braid. He closed the locket and thrust it into his bosom. He took his enemy's dagger, which was richly inlaid and wrought; and finally he broke off from the branch whose interposition had saved his life a twig with a cluster of acorns growing upon it. These also he dabbled with blood; then he mounted and rode slowly away, leaving the corpse and the other horse beneath the oak tree. This fight took place on a cool and breezy afternoon in the month of October, in a small valley between Dent Hill and Ennerdale Water in Cumberland. The horse remained beside his dead master until nightfall, because the latter's beard, blowing to and fro in the breeze, made him seem to be alive. But at night the horse trotted away, and by sunrise was standing at the gates of a Catholic monastery, fifty miles south-eastward of that fatal spot. CHAPTER III. FATHER, MOTHER, AND SON. Sir Brian rode north and west, crossing a small river, where he stopped to bathe his wounds, and then forward again for six or seven miles, until he came to the sea-coast and to the Kildhurm estates. It was already dusk when he dismounted in the courtyard of his castle. He had been absent for some weeks, and he had not been expected home so soon; nevertheless he was welcomed back most respectfully. He made no allusion to his late encounter at Ennerdale, but put on a gracious demeanour, and seemed altogether in unusually good spirits. When his wife came out to meet him, holding their little son by the hand, he greeted her with more than his customary urbanity; and stooped to kiss the boy, who, however, shrank away from him with an odd cry of aversion, as if he had smelt the death-scent in his breath. 'He should be trained to better manners,' said the knight, with a smile. 'He should see the world, then,' answered the wife. 'Are we so wholly apart from the world,' returned Sir Brian, fixing his eyes upon her, 'that no guests, bidden or unbidden, ever pass our gates?' 'Who should visit us in a spot so remote as this?' exclaimed Lady Kildhurm. 'It is much if now and then we catch sight of some clownish tenant of ours, riding by on the road beyond the park.' 'You love London better--is it not so?'