Denise rose up, and went towards the struggling pair. She took the bridle from the boy, and began to pull the donkey’s ears, to rub her poll, and talk to her as though she were a refractory child. The beast grew suddenly docile, and the bread was saved. Denise helped the boy to pick up the loaves. He looked hard at her when they had refilled the paniers, and then offered one of the loaves to Denise. “Take it,” he said almost roughly, yet with the brusqueness of a boy’s good-will. “It will be missed.” The boy gave a determined shake of the head. “Father’s bread. The jade served him the same trick last week, kicked the loaves on to a dung heap. He can’t blame me.” He thrust the loaf into Denise’s hand, gave her a friendly grin, and cut the ass viciously across the hind-quarters with his stick. The response on the beast’s part was a wild and hypocritical amble. This simple adventure on the road heartened Denise in very wonderful fashion, even as the voice of a child may interpose between a man and murder. It was like a mouthful of wine in the mouth of one ready to faint upon a journey. Denise watched the boy disappear, hardly thinking that she had been saved from despair by the obstinacy of an ass. She had the loaf in her hand and the boy’s smile in remembrance, and the mocking voices of the morning seemed less shamefully persistent. Denise broke and ate some of the bread, and finding a ditch near with a film of ice covering it, she broke the ice with her shoe, and soaking one corner of her tunic in the water, she washed the blood from her mouth and face. It was then that she found the money that Abbot Reginald had given her still knotted up in her clothes. And these two things, the bread and the money, comforted her with the thought that she was not utterly forgotten of God. Both blessings had come to her by chance, but when a soul is in the deeps it catches the straws that float to it, and believes them Heaven-sent. Despite her wounds and her bruisings Denise walked five miles before noon. The passion to escape from familiar faces and to sink into the outer world, had revived in her. She skirted Robertsbridge and its Abbey, crossing the Rother stream by a footbridge that she found. On the hill beyond she met a pedlar travelling with his pack, and taking out a piece of money bought a rough brown smock from him, a needle and some thread. About noon she found some dry litter under the shelter of a bank of furze. She put on her brown smock, and mended her cloak, and then despite the January cold, such an utter weariness came upon her that she fell asleep.