"Are you willing that the King should be deaf and dumb to your message?"
"If God will," said Master Richard again.
"What is that which you bear on your breast?"
"It is the five wounds, my father."
"Tell me of your life. Are you yet in the way of perfection?"
Then the two solitaries talked together a long while; I could not understand all that Master Richard told to me; and I think there was much that he did not tell me, but it was of matters that I am scarce worthy to name, of open visions and desolations, and the darkness of the fourth Word of our Saviour on the rood; and again of scents and sounds and melodies such as those of which Master Rolle has written; and above all of charity and its degrees, for without charity all the rest is counted as dung.
Avemaria rang at sunset, but they did not hear it, and at the end the holy man within crept nearer and raised himself.
"I must see your face, brother," he said. "It may be then that I shall know the message that your soul bears to the King."
Master Richard came out of his heavenly swoon then, and saw the face close to his own, and what he said of it to me I dare not tell you, but he bitterly reproached himself that he had ever doubted whether this were a man of God or no.
As he turned his own face this way and that, that the failing light might fall upon it, he said that beneath him in the little street there was a crowd assembled, all silent and watching the heavenly colloquy.