However, when he had disentangled
himself from his mother's caresses, he enforced himself to keep
a cheerful countenance, and upheld it the whole evening through,
and was by seeming merry at supper, and went to bed singing.
CHAPTER 3
Ralph Cometh to the Cheaping-Town
He slept in an upper chamber in a turret of the House,
which chamber was his own, and none might meddle with it.
There the next day he awoke in the dawning, and arose and
clad himself, and took his wargear and his sword and spear,
and bore all away without doors to the side of the Ford in that ingle
of the river, and laid it for a while in a little willow copse,
so that no chance-comer might see it; then he went back to
the stable of the House and took his destrier from the stall
(it was a dapple-grey horse called Falcon, and was right good,)
and brought him down to the said willow copse, and tied him
to a tree till he had armed himself amongst the willows,
whence he came forth presently as brisk-looking and likely
a man-at-arms as you might see on a summer day. Then he clomb
up into the saddle, and went his ways splashing across the ford,
before the sun had arisen, while the throstle-cocks were yet
amidst their first song.
Then he rode on a little trot south away; and by then the sun was up
he was without the bounds of Upmeads; albeit in the land thereabout
dwelt none who were not friends to King Peter and his sons:
and that was well, for now were folk stirring and were abroad in the fields;
as a band of carles going with their scythes to the hay-field; or a maiden
with her milking-pails going to her kine, barefoot through the seeding grass;
or a company of noisy little lads on their way to the nearest pool of
the stream that they might bathe in the warm morning after the warm night.
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