Robin did not parley with her.
“You will help me?” he asked, with quivering mouth.
“To tell the truth, yes,” and she closed the door on him and left him shivering in the dark.
It happened that morning soon after dawn that two of the brothers of the abbey of Lehon, who had gone out to work in the fields, saw a man running along the road that wound between poplar-trees towards the abbey. They stood and waited for the man to approach, struck by his strange look and the way he reeled from side to side. He came on like one half-dead with running, his mouth open, his eyes glazed. Not at first did they recognize his face, so drawn and distorted was it with suffering and despair.
“The abbey?—the abbey?”
He stood panting, waving his hand vaguely down the road, his knees giving under him so that he rocked like a young tree in a wind.
“By the love of Our Lady, it is Messire Robin!”
They moved towards him, thinking him mad, but the man dodged them and ran on down the road. The two brothers stood looking after him, wondering what ill news was in the wind that the young lord of La Bellière ran half naked along the highway to Lehon.
Master Stephen, the abbot, knelt at his prayers in the parlor when the brother who served as porter came to him with a grave face and told how Messire Robin Raguenel had run half naked into the abbey church and was lying like one dead before the altar. Master Stephen, who was a man of substance and circumspection, dismissed the brother and went alone into the church. On the altar steps he found Robin lying, weeping like a child, his face hidden in his arms.
“Messire Robin! Messire Robin!”