The old warrior's eye caught the bank, which was now receding rapidly past them; and when he saw that they were really floating downwards again, without an effort to stem the stream, he put away his bill, and sat himself down deliberately in his place, astonishing the onlookers quite as much as Philammon had done.
'Five minutes' good fighting, and no one killed! This is a shame!' quoth another.

'Blood we must see, and it had better be yours, master monk, than your betters','-- and therewith he rushed on poor Philammon.
He spoke the heart of the crew; the sleeping wolf in them had been awakened by the struggle, and blood they would have; and not frantically, like Celts or Egyptians, but with the cool humorous cruelty of the Teuton, they rose altogether, and turning Philammon over on his back, deliberated by what death he should die.
Philammon quietly submitted--if submission have anything to do with that state of mind in which sheer astonishment and novelty have broken up all the custom of man's nature, till the strangest deeds and sufferings are taken as matters of course.

His sudden escape from the Laura, the new world of thought and action into which he had been plunged, the new companions with whom he had fallen in, had driven him utterly from his moorings, and now anything and everything might happen to him.

He who had promised never to look upon woman found himself, by circumstances over which he had no control, amid a boatful of the most objectionable species of that most objectionable genus--and the utterly worst having happened, everything else which happened must be better than the worst.
For the rest, he had gone forth to see the world--and this was one of the ways of it.

So he made up his mind to see it, and be filled with the fruit of his own devices.
And he would have been certainly filled with the same in five minutes more, in some shape too ugly to be mentioned: but, as even sinful women have hearts in them, Pelagia shrieked out-- 'Amalric! Amalric! do not let them! I cannot bear it!' 'The warriors are free men, my darling, and know what is proper.