The Friar rose to his feet, and threw open the little lattice window. The cool night struck on his brow. The moon glowed large and fair over the city of spires and towers; in the distance the river lay a band of silver. A light wind stirred the branches of a neighbouring poplar. A girl passed humming a popular tune, and the distant shout of some hilarious scholar came through the air like the cry of a lonely ghost. The Friar breathed deeply of the pure air and loathed the confines of his narrow room. His eye regarded the great silent moon and glanced from spire to spire and tower to tower, silvered in the floods of light that poured from the heavens; his mind suddenly reverted to a similar scene of his boyhood. He remembered the night when his father had brought him, after travelling all day, to the monastery where he was to live henceforth and receive instruction, and how descending the hill-path they had first sighted the monastery on the other side of the valley, clothed in a vivid moonlight which revealed every detail of its exquisite architecture. As it broke upon his vision, it had seemed to the boy a mystic shrine of God, an exquisite casket wherein the Holy of Holies had His dwelling in the midst of chaste splendours and mildly luminous glories. Hence the Friar’s mind wandered back to earlier memories, to the house built of wattles and mud beneath the little hill, to the couple of oxen kept in the stall which he used to feed, to his sisters Peronelle and Alice, and his brothers Robert and Adam, with whom he used to play in the long water-meadows, and to his mother feeding, as was her accustomed task, the poultry on the headland. His eyes grew misty as he thought of them. He remembered the foresters bringing the dead deer up to the Manor, the shouting villeins driving the great plough through the furrows, and the festivals at Easter and Harvest. He called to mind his young days, before Sir John the parish priest had picked him out and had him instructed in good learning, when he ran like a greyhound through the wild wood, climbed the trees like a squirrel, swam like an otter in the swift river, and could shoot with his bow and play his quarterstaff with any boy in town. Then life was a real thing, a vivid enjoyment; physical activities and elemental emotions made up the sum of his careless, happy being. But now he had drunk deep of learning; he had wandered widely in the mazes of theology and philosophy. The heedless certainty of those untrammelled days had gone by for ever; he was now endlessly immersed in doubt and argument; a subtle logic was his, powerful to destroy but very weak to build. His learning had brought him to a land of shadows. Truth and reality, that had environed his youth, now the more escaped him the more he pursued them.