had let
fall the hood, worn by civilians as by priests out of doors, more than
half way over their faces.

A murmur of great surprise, disdain, and resentment, at the intrusion of
strangers so attired circulated round the neighbourhood in which they had
been placed, checked for a moment by a certain air of respect which the
officer had shown towards both, but especially the taller; but breaking
out with greater vivacity from the faint restraint, as the tall man
unceremoniously stretched across the board, drew towards himself an
immense flagon, which (agreeably to the custom of arranging the feast in
"messes" of four) had been specially appropriated to Ulf the Dane,
Godrith the Saxon, and two young Norman knights akin to the puissant Lord
of Grantmesnil,--and having offered it to his comrade, who shook his
head, drained it with a gusto that seemed to bespeak him at least no
Norman, and wiped his lips boorishly with the sleeve of his huge arm.

"Dainty sir," said one of those Norman knights, William Mallet, of the
house of Mallet de Graville [54], as he moved as far from the gigantic
intruder as the space on the settle would permit, "forgive the
observation that you have damaged my mantle, you have grazed my foot, and
you have drunk my wine. And vouchsafe, if it so please you, the face of
the man who hath done this triple wrong to William Mallet de Graville."

A kind of laugh--for laugh absolute it was not--rattled under the cowl of
the tall stranger, as he drew it still closer over his face, with a hand
that might have spanned the breast of his interrogator, and he made a
gesture as if he did not understand the question addressed to him.

Therewith the Norman knight, bending with demure courtesy across the
board to Godrith the Saxon, said:

"Pardex [55], but this fair guest and seigneur seemeth to me, noble
Godree (whose name I fear my lips do but rudely enounce) of Saxon line
and language; our Romance tongue he knoweth not. Pray you, is it the
Saxon custom to enter a king's hall so garbed, and drink a knight's wine
so mutely?"

Godrith, a young Saxon of considerable rank, but one of the most sedulous
of the imitators of the foreign fashions, coloured high at the irony in
the knight's speech, and turning rudely to the huge guest, who was now
causing immense fragments of pasty to vanish under the cavernous cowl, he
said in his native tongue, though with a lisp as if unfamiliar to him--

"If thou beest Saxon, sha