Meantime, with Sir Walter and his boys, Roger had manifestly risen many degrees by his "spirited conduct." Sir Launcelot's jests, they admitted, could bite, and it was just as well he should have a lesson, though rather a severe one. Sir Launcelot himself, moreover, took a far different demeanour towards Roger. "Saints with that amount of fire in their temper," he observed, "might be dangerous, but were certainly not despicable." And as to Lettice, whose moral code was chivalrous rather than Scriptural, and to whom generosity was a far more admirable virtue than justice, and honour a more glorious thing than duty, she said candidly she was delighted Roger had lost his temper for once, just to show every one how much heart and spirit he had. "You and I knew what he was, Olive," said she; "but I wanted the rest to feel it too." And yet there was something lost. Slowly I grew to see and feel it. Firstly, in the relative position of Roger and Sir Launcelot. Deeds of violence inevitably place the one who does them morally below the one who suffers. There had been a real honour to Roger in Sir Launcelot's previous mockery; there was a real dishonour in the assumption he now made that Roger stood on his own level. Moreover, Roger's own generous self-reproach deprived him of the power of retort. And secondly (but chiefly), in Lettice's altered feeling about Sir Launcelot. Roger never spoke of him; but now that he had recovered, I felt that I could not forget how, by Lettice's own account, he had provoked the blow; nor could I see that the fact of his having received a blow which he had provoked in any way made his character different from what it had been. Many debates we had on the subject, for we met often during those weeks--those weeks of winter and early spring, when the whole nation was in suspense about Lord Strafford's trial, watching during the ploughing and sowing of the year the solemn reaping of the harvest he had sown. One of these debates in particular I remember, because of the way in which it closed. It was on Thursday, the 13th of May (1641). We had met in the wood by the Lady Well. There seemed a marvellous melody that day in the music of the little spring, as it bubbled up into its stone trough, and echoed back from the stone roof of the little sacred cell the monks had lovingly made for it seven hundred years ago. The inscription could still be read on the front:-- "Ut jucundas cervus undas Æstuans desiderat, Sic ad rivum Dei vivum Mens fidelis properat." Lettice and I knelt and listened to it. "It is as if all the bells in fairy-land were ringing," said she at length, softly; "only hear how the soft peals rise and fall, and go and come, and how one sound drops into another, and blends with it, and flows away and comes back, and meets the next, until there is no following them."