"but full well I know that
it was not because Norman Leofwinesson is slain that I shed tears in
my sleep." For a while she drooped there, her eyes on the open window,
outside of which a robin was singing blithely among the cherries. But
all at once she seized the pillow with a kind of fierceness, and turned
it over and piled the others on top of it, crying under her breath, "How
dared he! How dared he! I will shed no tears for him while I am awake.
I will remember only that I am my father's daughter and the Lady of
Avalcomb."

Proudly as became an odal-woman, she followed the page when he came at
last to call her to the royal presence. The great stone hall in which
the King awaited the arrival of his Norman bride was the same room in
which he had feasted the night before, but tables and dishes now were
gone, gold-weighted tapestries hung once more over the door by which
Eric of Norway had made his entrance, and a rich-hued rug from an
Eastern loom lay over the spot where she had seen the axe rise and
fall. Crossing the threshold, the commonplaceness of it all clashed so
discordantly with the scene in her memory that for an instant she grew
faint and clung to the curtains between which she was passing. That
death should leave so little trace, that the spot which one night was
occupied by a headsman, the next, should hold a bride, made her fancy
reel with horror even while she pulled herself together sternly.

"This is life as in truth it is," she said. "It is well that I
understand at last how terrible everything really is, and how little
anything matters." Forcing herself to tread the rug with steady step,
she came where the King stood by an open window. He was as changed as
the room, though in honor of his bride he wore again state robes of silk
and cloth-of-gold, for the fire of the Northern lights was gone out
of his face, leaving it dull and lustreless. In the garden below,
a minstrel was making hay in the sun of the royal glance by a rapid
improvising of flattering verses which he was shouting lustily to his
twanging harp, but now the King's hand rose curtly.

"Your imagination has no small power, friend, yet save some virtues in
case you should want to sing to me again," he advised as he tossed down
a coin and turned away.

His ward courtesied deeply before him. "For your justice, King Canute, I
give you thanks drawn from the bottom of my heart," she said.

"I welcome you to your own, Lady of Avalcomb," he an