“I was sorely tempted,” sobbed she. “Sorely. To see you, rich and proud, upon your own lands, an earl may be,—may be, I thought at whiles, a king. But it could not be. It did not stand with honor, my hero,—not with honor.”
“Not with honor. Get me gay garments out of the chest, and let us go in royally, and royally feast my jolly riders.”
“Stay awhile,” said she, kissing his head as she combed and curled his long golden locks; and her own raven ones, hardly more beautiful, fell over them and mingled with them. “Stay awhile, my pride. There is another spell in the wind, stirred up by devil or witch-wife, and it comes from Tosti Godwinsson.”
“Tosti, the cold-meat butcher? What has he to say to me?”
“This,—‘If Hereward will come with me to William of Normandy, and help us against Harold, the perjured, then will William do for him all that Harold would have done, and more beside.’”
“And what answered Torfrida?”
“It was not so said to me that I could answer. I had it by a side-wind, through the Countess Judith.” [Footnote: Tosti’s wife, Earl Baldwin’s daughter, sister of Matilda, William the Conqueror’s wife.]
“And she had it from her sister, Matilda.”
“And she, of course, from Duke William himself.”
“And what would you have answered, if you had answered, pretty one?”