"Ay? and art thou come on such errand alone?" said Wilkin. "No, truly," answered Jorworth; "I have some two score of men concealed among yonder bushes." "Then thou hadst best lead them away quickly," answered Wilkin, "before our archers let fly a sheaf of arrows among them." "How, villain! Dost thou not mean to keep thy promise?" said the Welshman. "I gave thee none," said the Fleming; "I promised but to think on what thou didst say. I have done so, and have communicated with my ghostly father, who will in no respect hear of my listening to thy proposal." "And wilt thou," said Jorworth, "keep the cattle, which I simply sent into the castle on the faith of our agreement?" "I will excommunicate and deliver him over to Satan," said the monk, unable to wait the phlegmatic and lingering answer of the Fleming, "if he give horn, hoof, or hair of them, to such an uncircumcised Philistine as thou or thy master." "It is well, shorn priest," answered Jorworth in great anger. "But mark me--reckon not on your frock for ransom. When Gwenwyn hath taken this castle, as it shall not longer shelter such a pair of faithless traitors, I will have you sewed up each into the carcass of one of these kine, for which your penitent has forsworn himself, and lay you where wolf and eagle shall be your only companions." "Thou wilt work thy will when it is matched with thy power," said the sedate Netherlander. "False Welshman, we defy thee to thy teeth!" answered, in the same breath, the more irascible monk. "I trust to see hounds gnaw thy joints ere that day come that ye talk of so proudly." By way of answer to both, Jorworth drew back his arm with his levelled javelin, and shaking the shaft till it acquired a vibratory motion, he hurled it with equal strength and dexterity right against the aperture in the wicket. It whizzed through the opening at which it was aimed, and flew (harmlessly, however) between the heads of the monk and the Fleming; the former of whom started back, while the latter only said, as he looked at the javelin, which stood quivering in the door of the guard-room, "That was well aimed, and happily baulked." Jorworth, the instant he had flung his dart, hastened to the ambush which he had prepared, and gave them at once the signal and the example of a rapid retreat down the hill. Father Aldrovand would willingly have followed them with a volley of arrows, but the Fleming observed that ammunition was too precious with them to be wasted on a few runaways. Perhaps the honest man remembered that they had come within the danger of such a salutation, in some measure, on his own assurance. When the noise of the hasty retreat of Jorworth and his followers had died away, there ensued a dead silence, well corresponding with the coolness and calmness of that early hour in the morning. "This will not last long," said Wilkin to the monk, in a tone of foreboding seriousness, which found an echo in the good father's bosom.