So while we may, let us take what joy we can, since the ill that goes before ofttimes follows after also.
Come, let us mount and away to London to find friends and justice." Then, having spoken a few words to his house-people, he lifted Cicely to her horse, and they rode out into the softly-falling snow, thinking that they had seen their last of the Towers for many a day.

But this was not to be.

For as they passed along the Blossholme highway, purposing to leave the Abbey on their left, when they were about three miles from Cranwell, suddenly a tall fellow, who wore a great sheepskin coat with a monk's hood to it and carried a thick staff in his hand, burst through the fence and stood in front of them.
"Who are you ?" asked Christopher, laying his hand upon his sword.
"You'd know me well enough if my hood were back," he answered in a deep voice; "but if you want my name, it's Thomas Bolle, cattle-reeve to the Abbey yonder." "Your voice proves you," said Christopher, laughing.

"And now what is your business, lay-brother Bolle ?" "To get up a bunch of yearling steers that have been running on the forest-edge, living, like the rest of us, on what they can find, as the weather is coming on hard enough to starve them.

That's my business, Sir Christopher.