A vast host of armed men seemed to cover the earth as far as he could see. The boy had not known before that the whole world contained so many soldiers. One company was in the rough meadow close at hand. In the bright light he could discern them clearly--strong men of war, with battered steel breastplates, half blue, half red with rust, and iron caps upon their heads. Some of these were leading a score of horses back and down to the brook whence he had come. Others toiled at levelling some half-dozen camp-tents of white cloth, with crimson stripes, while still others crowded about the place where sparks crackled and black smoke curled about huge caldrons wherein food was cooking. At the peak of the largest tent, high upon the staff, floated gently in the early breeze an emblazoned standard, bearing the blood-red three roundels of the Courtenays. For a moment Hugh's thoughts stopped at the memory of the strange Knight and his letter; somewhere among this band of brawny fighting men would be the four caitiffs who were here to slay that unknown Devon gentleman, Sir Hereward. He glanced at his little finger, whereon the signet ring of the three fishes glittered unwontedly,--and marvelled to find his base-born skin touched by such a trinket, for he had resisted Peter's desire to take it over to the Abbey treasury,--and then the glance lifted itself to still more marvellous things. Away in the distance, on the topmost point to the left hand of the highroad, Hugh had already noted a brave pavilion, guarded by banks of earth raised since last he saw that familiar horizon, and overhung by what he saw now to be the royal standard of England's Kings. A blare of trumpets, rolling in sharp echoes from mound to mound across the field, proceeded now from this point, and as he looked Hugh saw upon the highway, setting forth in his direction, a little cavalcade of knights and ladies whose dress and trappings sparkled in the morning sun, even thus afar, like the lights on the High Altar beneath the painted windows. Onward this group of riders came--and the boy, creeping under the cover of the hedge, stole forward with no other thought than to see them close at hand. And so it was that he crouched in listening silence, not more than twenty paces removed, when this thing happened. The tall, grave-faced, golden-haired noble whom Hugh knew to be John, Earl of Devon, clad all in burnished steel, and bearing a great lion-crested tilting helmet upon his arm, strode forth from the company near the ruins to the highway, and stood thus, with bare head erect in the sunlight, until the riders, cantering lightly over the dew-laid road, drew rein before him. Then he advanced, and bending with one knee to earth, kissed the hand of a lady who, with a single knight, rode at the head of the little train. [Illustration: "HE ADVANCED AND KISSED THE LADY'S HAND."]