“I will pray, I will pray,” said the holy man; “I will wrestle in prayer. Ah that he could slay the wicked, and reward the proud according to his deservings! Ah that he could rid me and my master, and my young lady, of this son of Belial,--this devourer of widows and orphans,--this slayer of the poor and needy, who fills this place with innocent blood,--him of whom it is written, ‘They stretch forth their mouth unto the heaven, and their tongue goeth through the world. Therefore fall the people unto them, and thereout suck they no small advantage.’ I will shrive him, shrive him of all save robbing the priest, and for that he must go to the bishop, if he live; and if not, the Lord have mercy on his soul.” And so, weeping and trembling, the good old man pronounced the words of absolution. Hereward rose, thanked him, and then hurried out in silence. “You will pray your very loudest, Priest,” said Martin, as he followed his young lord. “I will, I will,” quoth he, and kneeling down began to chant that noble seventy-third Psalm, “Quam bonus Israel,” which he had just so fitly quoted. “Thou gavest him the bag, Martin?” said Hereward, as they hurried on. “You are not dead yet. ‘No pay, no play,’ is as good a rule for priest as for layman.” “Now then, Martin Lightfoot, good-bye. Come not with me. It must never be said, even slanderously, that I brought two into the field against one; and if I die, Martin--” “You won’t die!” said Lightfoot, shutting his teeth. “If I die, go back to my people somehow, and tell them that I died like a true earl’s son.” Hereward held out his hand; Martin fell on his knees and kissed it; watched him with set teeth till he disappeared in the wood; and then started forward and entered the bushes at a different spot. “I must be nigh at hand to see fair play,” he muttered to himself, “in case any of his ruffians be hanging about. Fair play I’ll see, and fair play I’ll give, too, for the sake of my lord’s honor, though I be bitterly loath to do it. So many times as I have been a villain when it was of no use, why mayn’t I be one now, when it would serve the purpose indeed? Why did we ever come into this accursed place? But one thing I will do,” said he, as he ensconced himself under a thick holly, whence he could see the meeting of the combatants upon an open lawn some twenty yards away; “if that big bull-calf kills my master, and I do not jump on his back and pick his brains out with this trusty steel of mine, may my right arm--” And Martin Lightfoot swore a fearful oath, which need not here be written. The priest had just finished his chant of the seventy-third Psalm, and had betaken himself in his spiritual warfare, as it was then called, to the equally apposite fifty-second, “Quid gloriaris?” “Why boastest thou thyself, thou tyrant, that thou canst do mischief, whereas the goodness of God endureth yet daily?” “Father! father!” cried a soft voice in the doorway, “where are you?” And in hurried the Princess.