There is in the hills that shut in the garden of the Cotentin, in the depths of Normandy, a happy town with pastures and with orchards all around. It is called the Silent Valley, Sourdeval. Here had a child been born in the castle of the place to the lord of it, and they had given him the name Robert, after the last great duke who was the leader of them all. This child Robert, grown a man, had armed himself and mounted himself, and followed the Crusade, and he it was who sprang first upon the wall of Jerusalem on that great day: Robert of Sourdeval, in the country of Avranches, under the shadow of the shrine which is called “St. Michael in peril of the sea.” But even as he leapt upon the wall, and in the moment of his exaltation, he saw southward, upon the Tower of David, a great banner suddenly catching the sun, and he knew that it was the banner of Toulouse. From the south also the city had been forced, and he cried as he saw that banner, “Ville gagnée!” * * * * * Of the men who had followed and endured till the end and had entered Jerusalem, one from the Pyrenees, three years later, came home. A ship had taken him across the seas, pirates had captured it off Cyrene, and had shackled him as a galley slave; in the Balearics he had escaped by night with a Christian fisherman for guide. They had made Narbonne, and so this man had come, darkened by the Eastern sun and lean and broken from the wars, home at last to his farm. There he found all those who had mourned him for dead, and his old father living still by the turf fire, but too forgetful of the world to welcome him. And as he told the old man of the wars, that old man only felt dimly in his fading mind (which was not wholly forgetful of Aragon and of Leon and the Cid Campeador) that all the world was full of fighting against Mahound. Already five years past Huesca had been forced by Christian arms, and already three years past the Cid was dead. THE LOSS OF AQUITAINE (_March 21, 1152_) Easter came early in the year 1152, and that Lent was cold. In the week before Palm Sunday, the middle week of March, the sodden roads of the great plains to the north and to the east of Orleans had trains upon them of men and wagons making all for Beaugency, two days below Orleans down the river--Beaugency, the little town at the opening of its shallow valley, standing upon the north bank of the Loire and facing the poor sun of this winter end.