It is scarcely necessary to say that notwithstanding the unction wherewith the Earl had expatiated to Guenllian on his possession of a French Bible, he did not see the least necessity for bringing Roger in contact with that volume. He had indeed come upon certain passages therein which he theoretically regarded with reverence as "good words," but which he was nevertheless far from elevating into rules for his daily conduct. It never occurred to him that his Bible and his life had anything to do with one another. He would have thought it as reasonable to regulate his diet by the particular clothes he wore, as to guide his actions by that compilation of "excellent matter" upon which he looked as supremely uninteresting and hardly intended for laymen.
About a week had elapsed since Roger became an inmate of the Earl's household. He and Lawrence slept in a small turret chamber, with a young priest, by name Sir Gerard de Stanhope, whom the Earl had appointed governor of his youthful ward. The boys, who went to bed earlier than the governor, very frequently employed the interval before his arrival, not in sleep, but in confidential conversation—the rather since it was the only time of day when they could talk together without fear of being overheard.
"Lolly!" said Roger on the night in question. He lay in a blue silk bed embroidered with red and gold griffins; Lawrence in a little plain trundle-bed which was pushed under the larger one in the day-time.
"My Lord?" obediently responded Lawrence.
"How doth this place like thee?"
"Please it your Lordship, it liketh me reasonable well," answered Lawrence, in a tone even less decisive than the words.
"It liketh me unreasonable ill," returned Roger in a voice wherein no want of decision could be traced.
"What ails you thereat, my Lord?"
"Lolly, I like nobody here but thee."
"That grudgeth me, my Lord." By which Lawrence meant to say that he was sorry to hear it. "Loves not your Lordship neither my Lord nor my Lady?"