the ground as he spoke; for Edith, shrinking and
unsoftened towards him, held no lap to receive it; and Hilda, to whom
Edward had been speaking in a low voice, advanced to the spot and struck
the jewel with her staff under the hoofs of the king's palfrey.

"Son of Emma, the Norman woman, who sent thy youth into exile, trample on
the gifts of thy Norman kinsman. And if, as men say, thou art of such
gifted holiness that Heaven grants thy hand the power to heal, and thy
voice the power to curse, heal thy country, and curse the stranger!"

She extended her right arm to William as she spoke, and such was the
dignity of her passion, and such its force, that an awe fell upon all.
Then dropping her hood over her face, she slowly turned away, regained
the summit of the knoll, and stood erect beside the altar of the Northern
god, her face invisible through the hood drawn completely over it, and
her form motionless as a statue.

"Ride on," said Edward, crossing himself.

"Now by the bones of St. Valery," said William, after a pause, in which
his dark keen eye noted the gloom upon the King's gentle face, "it moves
much my simple wonder how even presence so saintly can hear without wrath
words so unleal and foul. Gramercy, an the proudest dame in Normandy
(and I take her to be wife to my stoutest baron, William Fitzosborne) had
spoken thus to me--"

"Thou wouldst have done as I, my brother," interrupted Edward; "prayed to
our Lord to pardon her, and rode on pitying."

William's lip quivered with ire, yet he curbed the reply that sprang to
it, and he looked with affection genuinely more akin to admiration than
scorn, upon his fellow-prince. For, fierce and relentless as the Duke's
deeds were, his faith was notably sincere; and while this made, indeed,
the prince's chief attraction to the pious Edward, so, on the other hand,
this bowed the Duke in a kind of involuntary and superstitious homage to
the man who sought to square deeds to faith. It is ever the case with
stern and stormy spirits, that the meek ones which contrast them steal
strangely into their affections. This principle of human nature can
alone account for the enthusiastic devotion which the mild sufferings of
the Saviour awoke in the fiercest exterminators of the North. In
proportion, often, to the warrior's ferocity, was his love to that Divine
model, at whose sufferings he wept, to whose tomb he wandered barefoot,
and whose example of compassionate forgivenes