“Go and meet the Abbot and warn him, he will pass Headly Cross.”
“But then we may but share his fate,” said several.
“I shall go if I go alone,” said Cuthbert.
“And so shall I,” said Gregory Bell.
“Well, two are as good as the lot of us, and better; more likely to pass unobserved,” said Adam Banister; “the rest of us had better get home, and tell the monks all we have heard and seen.”
It was a wild place, Headly Cross, where two woodland roads crossed each other. Report said that a cruel murder had been committed there years agone, and that the place was haunted; every one believed in haunted places then.
But as there was a choice of routes, and the Abbot might come either way, it was the right thing to await him where the roads converged.
And there Cuthbert and Gregory waited all alone, as the dark hours rolled away, until they heard the “Angelus” ring from a distant tower, and knew it was nine o’clock, when decent people, in those days, went to bed.