Through the darkness came the glimmer of moving lights and the sound of far-off voices singing in modulation and time. He propped himself on his elbow and strained his eyes and ears. The swinging lights approached, the singing came nearer; he heard the sound of feet on the rough causeway. A band of pilgrims, having risen before it was yet light, went on their way to Saint Thomas of Canterbury with their lanterns and staves in their hands, and their mouths filled with divine songs. In Gregorian cadence they sang the penitential psalms, and Peter listened as a man in a dream to their solemn chanting growing fainter and fainter in the distance, and watched their glimmering lanterns extinguished one by one in the obscurity. It was as though he had seen a vision of the Saints of God going up with their lamps burning to the altar of the Most High, singing ‘Holy, holy, holy.’ He gazed after them, long after they had disappeared, with wide eyes and parted lips. ‘She was right,’ he said at length, speaking slowly to himself. ‘She is a godly woman. She shall go on pilgrimage with me, though it be to Rome itself.’ He thought of the blessed Saint Godric and how he had borne his mother Romewards on his back, and how an angel had come down from Heaven to help them on their way. He waited for the morning to break. II Peter was footsore and weary. For three days he had walked from sunrise to sunset, and now, at the end of the third day, his shipman’s legs were stiff and his feet blistered almost to bleeding. But he valiantly stepped forward, looking neither to left nor right, aiding himself much by his staff, and planting his feet firmly on the rough way. He began to recognise the landmarks. There, blue-black against the red-shot sky of sunset, lay the Cow’s Back, as he had seen it so often of old, like a barrier for ever dividing darkness from intolerable splendours; there, winding down and clothing the valley as far as the eye could reach in a mantle of sombre foliage, lay the Ravens Wood, in which he had so often gone shooting with his little bow when a boy; there, wave after wave in multitudinous succession swept the grassy uplands over which he had seen the villeins drive the herds in the fresh light of so many mornings of yore; there, clad in bramble and gorse and heather, stretched the wild common where he had been wont to gather the ripe berries in autumn. And now, as he came nearer home, there was the splintered oak which folk called ‘the Fairies,’ round which he had danced with two little village girls for good luck when a lad; there were the two huge and solitary stones, by which he had played with his dead brother through many a long summer’s day; there was the standing pool upon which he had been wont to slide with the village boys in the hard winters; there was the desolate mere where he had found the bittern’s nest.