CHAPTER IV: The Travelling Preacher.
Perhaps it was the memory of those spiteful and malicious glances bent upon his preceptor by Brother Fabian that suggested to Edred upon the day following to pay a visit to the secret chamber that had once before so well sheltered a helpless fugitive.
The secret of that chamber still remained with the three boys and their faithful esquire, Warbel.

To no other living soul in the house had any of these four ever named the matter.

The boys might not have been able to give any reason for this reticence towards their parents, but the fact remained that they had never revealed the secret to them, and that although tradition still spoke of a cleverly-masked chamber somewhere at Chad, it was now popularly supposed to have been in that part of the house which had boon demolished during the Wars of the Roses.

Children did not chatter to their parents in days of old as they do now.

They might love them never so well, but they held them in reverence and even in awe.