As the forest thinned into scrub again it came stronger and fresher, and he found himself sniffing it like a hungry man at the approach of food.

"If my manor of Highstead is like this," he told himself, "I think I will lay my bones there." At a turn of the road where two grassy tracks forked, he passed a graven stone now chipped and moss-grown, set on noble eminence among reddening thorns.

It was an altar to the old gods of the land, there had been another such in the forest of his childhood.

The priest had told him it was the shrine of the Lord Apollo and forbade him on the pain of a mighty cursing to do reverence to it.

Nevertheless he had been wont to doff his cap when he passed it, for he respected a god that lived in the woods instead of a clammy church.