As he sat thus musing a young man entered cautiously, looked around, and sidled towards him. He was deformed.
The chaplain looked up and asked what he required.
"I have come for a talk," said the visitor. "May I sit? I know this hall well; it belonged to my father. I am Goronwy, son of the former Archpriest Ewan or John, as you please to call him."
Cadell signed to a seat. He was not ill-pleased at a distraction from his unpleasant thoughts, and he was not a little gratified to find a man of the place ready to approach him without apparent animosity or suspicion.
"You do not appear to me to have a pleasant place," pursued Goronwy. "I saw a beetle once enter a hive. The bees fell on him, and in spite of his hardness, stung him to death, and after that built a cairn of wax over him. There he lay all the summer, and every bee that entered or left the hive trampled on the mound of wax that covered their enemy."
"Their stings shall be plucked out," said Cadell.
"Aye, but you cannot force them to furnish you with honey, nor prevent them from entombing you in wax. They will do it—imperceptibly, and tread you underfoot at the last."
Cadell said nothing to this; he muttered angrily and contemptuously, and drew back from the fire to look at his visitor.
A lad with a long face, keen, beady eyes, restless and cunning, long arms, and large white hands. His body was misshapen and short, but his limbs disproportionately long.
"I should have been Archpriest here," pursued he; "but because I am not straight as a wand, they rejected me. In your Latin Church, are they as particular on this point?"