When Audry at length looked up, Aline was standing wringing the water out of her dripping hair, shaken and bruised and cut in several places, but alive. She took off the garment she had on and wrung it out before putting it on again. She then paused for a moment not knowing what to do. Blood was flowing freely from a deep cut below the right knee and also from a wound on the back of her right shoulder. She hesitated to tear her things for fear of the wrath of Mistress Mowbray, but at the same time was frightened at the loss of blood. Finally she tore off some strips of linen and bandaged herself as well as she could manage and made her way to where the man was lying. Ian Menstrie had had a hard struggle. He had been working as a carpenter in Paris and had fallen in with some of his exiled countrymen and become for a time a servant to John Knox. It was three weeks since he had left France with the important documents that he was bearing from Knox and others; and only his iron determination had carried him through. Time and again nothing but the utmost daring and resourcefulness had enabled him to slip through his enemies’ hands. He had actually been searched twice unsuccessfully before he was finally arrested as a heretic at York. After extreme suffering he had escaped again and the precious papers were still with him. He had reached Aske Hall in Yorkshire, some twenty miles or so, over the hills, from Holwick, the home of Elizabeth of Aske, mother of Margaret Bowes, whom Knox had married, a lady with whom the reformer regularly corresponded. But almost at once he again had to give his pursuers the slip, and he made his way up Teesdale with the precious papers still on him. Although they were hot on his trail he had managed to get through Middleton in the night unobserved and would probably have reached the hills and got away North, unseen; but he met a little four-year-old boy on the road, who had fallen and hurt himself and was sitting in the rain and crying bitterly. There was nothing serious about it, but the child had a large bruise on his forehead. Ian had hesitated a moment, looking apprehensively behind, but stopped and bathed the bruise at a beck close by, comforted the child and carried him to his home and set him down just outside the little garden.