“Send for him.”
“This Torfrida,” said William, “haunts me.”
“Pray Heaven she have not bewitched your Majesty.”
“Tut! I am too old a campaigner to take much harm by woman’s sharpshooting at fifteen score yards off, beside a deep stream between. No. The woman has courage,—and beauty, too, you say?”
“What of that, O Prince?” said the Italian. “Who more beautiful—if report be true—than those lost women who dance nightly in the forests with Venus and Herodias,—as it may be this Torfrida has done many a time?”
“You priests are apt to be hard upon poor women.”
“The fox found that the grapes were sour,” said the Italian, laughing at himself and his cloth, or at anything else by which he could curry favor.
“And this woman was no vulgar witch. That sort of personage suits Taillebois’s taste, rather than Hereward’s.”
“Hungry dogs eat dirty pudding,” said Ivo, pertinently.
“The woman believed herself in the right. She believed that the saints of heaven were on her side. I saw it in her attitude, in her gestures. Perhaps she was right.”