t for him at the board. He coloured
violently, and looked first at the King, and then at Osmond, but Osmond
held up his finger in warning; he remembered how he had lost his temper
before, and what had come of it, and resolved to try to bear it better;
and just then the Baron's daughter, a gentle-looking maiden of fifteen or
sixteen, came and spoke to him, and entertained him so well, that he did
not think much more of his offended dignity.--When they set off on their
journey again, the Baron and several of his followers came with them to
show the only safe way across the morass, and a very slippery,
treacherous, quaking road it was, where the horses' feet left pools of
water wherever they trod. The King and the Baron rode together, and the
other French Nobles closed round them; Richard was left quite in the
background, and though the French men-at-arms took care not to lose sight
of him, no one offered him any assistance, excepting Osmond, who, giving
his own horse to Sybald, one of the two Norman grooms who accompanied
him, led Richard's horse by the bridle along the whole distance of the
marshy path, a business that could scarcely have been pleasant, as Osmond
wore his heavy hauberk, and his pointed, iron-guarded boots sunk deep at
every step into the bog. He spoke little, but seemed to be taking good
heed of every stump of willow or stepping-stone that might serve as a
note of remembrance of the path.

At the other end of the morass began a long tract of dreary-looking,
heathy waste, without a sign of life. The Baron took leave of the King,
only sending three men-at-arms, to show him the way to a monastery, which
was to be the next halting-place. He sent three, because it was not safe
for one, even fully armed, to ride alone, for fear of the attacks of the
followers of a certain marauding Baron, who was at deadly feud with him,
and made all that border a most perilous region. Richard might well
observe that he did not like the Vexin half as well as Normandy, and that
the people ought to learn Fru Astrida's story of the golden bracelets,
which, in his grandfather's time, had hung untouched for a year, in a
tree in a forest.

It was pretty much the same through the whole journey, waste lands,
marshes, and forests alternated. The Castles stood on high mounds
frowning on the country round, and villages were clustered round them,
where the people either fled away, driving off their cattle with them at
the first si