"Or, if you will have it a little otherwise," Sir Bertram said to the Lady Margaret, "let it be thus. This monstrous fair and magic lady saw this Sir Paris in a grove or amid the smoke of war or where you will in Venice or near it. And so she fell enamoured of him. Such things happen. And so, coming in a magic boat, in the morning before cockcrow she finds him—having waited many years for this chance—by the sea-shore where you say that chapel was. And so she beguiles him to step aboard and miraculously they are transported to the very isles of Greece. And there, poor man, he sitteth in the sun, lamenting beneath a vine as they say there are in Greece, and to beguile him she dances before him...." The Lady Margaret held out her white hand to silence the words upon his lips. And so they heard a voice speak to the porter below and a heavy tread upon the stairfoot. "Sir," the Lady Margaret said to the Cornish knight, "I think you do lie. For I hear my true love’s voice and his foot upon the stair." At that heavy beating of an iron foot on the stone steps a sort of fear descended upon both Sir Bertram and the Lady Margaret; but the old Princess said jestingly: "Now I shall see the eighth wonder of the world." VI John Sherwood, Bishop Palatine of Durham, was seated in a deep chair, in the vestiary of his dwelling in Durham Castle. He had just come in there from the cathedral, and he was very weary with having sung a solemn mass for the soul of Sir Leofric Bertram, one that had, in times past, been a great benefactor of that see. This mass was sung every year upon the second day of July and, along with the oration, it lasted a full two hours. He had had a little fever too, and was weak with the monthly bloodletting which had been done the day before; for the Prince Bishop and his household were bled upon the first day of each month. Moreover, he was fasting till then, and it was close on the stroke of eleven. So, although a good dinner awaited him, of five courses, each of fifteen dishes, he had felt so tired that there, in his own vestiary—for he did not wear the vestments of the cathedral or the monastery, but, in all his canonicals, walked across the green from the cathedral down to the castle with the people all kneeling and candles and a great cross and his crozier carried before him—he had fallen down into the deep chair in his mass garments. It made it the worse that his vestiary was up two flights of stairs in the castle that was old and not well arranged.