"Alain."
They left the church together, and sought a solitary place on the brink of the hill above.
Where the modern tourist often surveys the city from the ridge of Rose Hill, our friends gazed. The city, great even then, lay within its protecting rivers and its new walls, dominated by the huge keep of the castle of Robert d'Oyley which the reader still may see from the line, as he nears the city.
But what a different scene it looked down upon. The moon illumined its gray walls, and the fires of the besiegers shone with a lurid glare about the city and within its streets, while the white, ghostly country environed it around.
"Thou hast kept thy tryst, Osric."
"And thou thine, Alain; but thine was the hardest. How didst thou get out? by the way we agreed upon before I left Oxford?"
"It was a hard matter. The castle is beleaguered, the usurper is there, and that treacherous priest, his brother, says a sort of black Mass every day in the camp: the city is all their own, and only the castle holds out."
"And how is our lady?"
"Poor Domina,[20] as she signs herself. Ah, well, she shall not starve while there is a fragment of food in the neighbourhood, but, Oh, Osric! hunger is hard to bear; fortunate wert thou to be chosen to accompany our lord in that desperate sally a month agone which took you all safely to Wallingford. But what news dost thou bring?"
"That the great Earl of Gloucester and Henry Plantagenet have landed in England, and will await the Empress at Wallingford if she can escape from Oxford."