I am, as it were, her spiritual lover; and were she a damsel errant, I would be her ghostly esquire, her friar militant.

I would buckle me in armour of proof, and the devil might thresh me black with an iron flail, before I would knock under in her cause.

Though they be not yet one canonically, thanks to your soldiership, the earl is her liege lord, and she is his liege lady.

I am her father confessor and ghostly director: I have taken on me to show her the way to the next world; and how can I do that if I lose sight of her in this?
seeing that this is but the road to the other, and has so many circumvolutions and ramifications of byeways and beaten paths (all more thickly set than the true one with finger-posts and milestones, not one of which tells truth), that a traveller has need of some one who knows the way, or the odds go hard against him that he will ever see the face of Saint Peter." "But there must surely be some reason," said Sir Ralph, "for father Peter's apprehension." "None," said brother Michael, "but the apprehension itself; fear being its own father, and most prolific in self-propagation.

The lady did, it is true, once signalize her displeasure against our little brother, for reprimanding her in that she would go hunting a-mornings instead of attending matins.