Godwin, his elbow resting against the tomb that hid his father's heart, prayed also, until even his earnestness was outworn, and he began to wonder about many things.
That dream of his, for instance, in his sickness, when he had seemed to be dead, and what might be the true duty of man.

To be brave and upright?
Surely.

To fight for the Cross of Christ against the Saracen?
Surely, if the chance came his way.

What more?
To abandon the world and to spend his life muttering prayers like those priests in the darkness behind him?
Could that be needful or of service to God or man?
To man, perhaps, because such folk tended the sick and fed the poor.

But to God?
Was he not sent into the world to bear his part in the world--to live his full life?
This would mean a half-life--one into which no woman might enter, to which no child might be added, since to monks and even to certain brotherhoods, all these things, which Nature decreed and Heaven had sanctified, were deadly sin.
It would mean, for instance, that he must think no more of Rosamund.