"Tell me truly, ah gentle lording and my son, what it was that befell you. So I may the better judge."
And when the monk heard first how the young man had watched his harness within the chapel, that alone seemed to him a proof of a midsummer madness such as a reasonable confessor should have persuaded him against. And he gained in this conviction the more when he heard how Behemoth, Leviathan, Mahound, Helen of Troy, the Witch of Endor and Syrians in strange robes had visited the young man and had tempted him there in the darkness. All these things were strange to the good and simple monk whose knowledge of sorceries ended at crooked old women and the White Lady of Spindleston. He knew not more than half the names of the Young Lovell's hobgoblins.
Then he marked how the young man spoke of a woman's face that looked in on him in the chapel and seemed to tempt him, and the monk considered that that might happen to any man, for had he not, a minute gone, seen a woman, fair enough to tempt any man to follow her, looking into his cell. For he remembered her as the fairest woman he had ever seen, with dark and serious eyes; though she smiled mockingly too, which was what, in the life of this world, this monk had asked of women. And he had yet to learn that the desire to follow after a fair woman was, in a gallant lording, any mortal sin, else Hell must be fuller than the kind Lord Jesus would have it Who died to save us therefrom.
Thus all things hardened this monk in the conceit that the Young Lovell suffered more from over fasting than from any cardinal sin, and when it came to the story of the very fair woman sitting upon a white horse amidmost of doves and sparrows and great bright flowers, though it gave him some pause to think that this had lasted for ninety days, yet it abashed him very little.
Then the Young Lovell was done with his tale. The monk asked him first of all:
"Now tell me truly, my gentle son; how can you tell this lady from one of the kind saints or from the angelic host?"
"In truth I could not tell you that," the young lording said, "it is only that I know it."
"And if you spake no word with her," the monk asked further, "how may you know that her thoughts were wicked? Had you not fasted long? Had you dwelt especially upon lewd thoughts before that time? Should you not have been, if any poor mortal may be, in a degree of as much grace as we may attain to?"
"It is true," the Young Lovell said, "that I had done my best, but we are all so black with sin as against any true and perfect knights...."
The monk would not let him finish this speech.