"Anon, my son," said he, "you shall go back with me to peace. We thought, indeed, that you had left us with the thrall Cerdic, and we were not pleased. Your wife and daughter have been in a rare way, so they tell me." For long hours, as Hyla fell asleep covered with a skin upon the deck, he heard the low voices of the monk and his host in the cabin. It was a soothing monotone in the night silence. In the morning Lisolé came to him and woke him. "The father and I have talked the night through," he said, "and soon I leave my home for Icomb. 'Twill be better so. We will start anon. It is hard parting, even with this small dwelling, but it is Godys will, I do not doubt." CHAPTER XV "Though you be in a place of safety, do not, on that account, think yourself secure."--SAINT BERNARD. Brother Felix, the monk who had come to them from Icomb, bade them rest another day before setting out over the lake. "Ye have had a shrewd shog, Lisolé, in the news that Hyla brought, and he also has gone hardly of late. Let us rest a day and eat well, and talk withal. There is a bottle of clary that the Prior sent. It is good to rest here." His merry black eyes regarded them with an eminent satisfaction at his proposal. It was his holiday, this trip from the Priory, and he had no mind to curtail it. There was yet a quaint strain of melancholy humour about the ex-fool. The joy had gone, the wit lingered. His sojourn alone among the waters had mellowed it, added a new virtue to the essential sadness of the jester. And Felix was no ordinary man. He had been an epicure in such things once. What the time could give of culture was his. He had been a writer of MS., a lay scriptor in the house of the Bishop at Rouen; he had illuminated missals in London, was a good Latinist, and, even in that time, had a little Greek. A day with Lisolé was a most pleasant variant to a life which he lived with real endeavour, but which was sometimes at war with his mental needs. So they sat out on deck, among all the medley of the jester's rough household goods, on deck in the sunshine, while the monk and the prospective novice ranged over their experiences. Hyla had never heard such talk before. Indeed, it is not too much to say that through all the years of his life he had never, until this day, been present at a _conversation_. Nearly all the words the serf had heard, almost all the words he himself had spoken, were about things which people could touch and see. He and his friends, Cerdic notably, had touched on the unseen things of religion--"principalities and powers" who dominated the future--in their own uncouth way. But conversation about the abstract things of this earthly life he had rarely heard before. For the first hour the novelty of it almost stunned him. He listened without thought, drinking it all in with an eagerness which defied consideration. It was his first and last social experience! "Wilt not be so lonely in the cloister, friend," said Felix.