the chance of active persecution from the
Church, by ample donations to all the neighbouring monasteries.

Hilda, in fine, was a woman of sublime desires and extraordinary gifts;
terrible, indeed, but as the passive agent of the Fates she invoked, and
rather commanding for herself a certain troubled admiration and
mysterious pity; no fiend-hag, beyond humanity in malice and in power,
but essentially human, even when aspiring most to the secrets of a god.
Assuming, for the moment, that by the aid of intense imagination, persons
of a peculiar idiosyncrasy of nerves and temperament might attain to such
dim affinities with a world beyond our ordinary senses, as forbid entire
rejection of the magnetism and magic of old times--it was on no foul and
mephitic pool, overhung with the poisonous nightshade, and excluded from
the beams of heaven, but on the living stream on which the star trembled,
and beside whose banks the green herbage waved, that the demon shadows
fell dark and dread.

Thus safe and thus awful, lived Hilda; and under her care, a rose beneath
the funeral cedar, bloomed her grandchild Edith, goddaughter of the Lady
of England.

It was the anxious wish, both of Edward and his virgin wife, pious as
himself, to save this orphan from the contamination of a house more than
suspected of heathen faith, and give to her youth the refuge of the
convent. But this, without her guardian's consent or her own expressed
will, could not be legally done; and Edith as yet had expressed no desire
to disobey her grandmother, who treated the idea of the convent with
lofty scorn.

This beautiful child grew up under the influence, as it were, of two
contending creeds; all her notions on both were necessarily confused and
vague. But her heart was so genuinely mild, simple, tender, and
devoted,--there was in her so much of the inborn excellence of the sex,
that in every impulse of that heart struggled for clearer light and for
purer air the unquiet soul. In manner, in thought, and in person as yet
almost an infant, deep in her heart lay yet one woman's secret, known
scarcely to herself, but which taught her, more powerfully than Hilda's
proud and scoffing tongue, to shudder at the thought of the barren
cloister and the eternal vow.

CHAPTER III.

While King Edward was narrating to the Norman Duke all that he knew, and
all that he knew not, of Hilda's history and secret arts, the road wound
through lands as wild and wold-li