“That we might sing to you, and make you merry.”
Hereward answered them with a terrible word, and turned his face to the wall, groaning, and then bade them sternly to go.
So they went, for the time.
The jailer told this to Sir Robert, who saw all, being a kind-hearted man.
“From his poor first wife, eh? Well, there can be no harm in that. Nor if they came from this Lady Alftruda either, for that matter; let them go in and out when they will.”
“But they may be spies and traitors.”
“Then we can but hang them.”
Robert of Herepol, it would appear from the chronicle, did not much care whether they were spies or not.
So the men went to and fro, and often sat with Hereward. But he forbade them sternly to mention Torfrida’s name.
Alftruda sent to him meanwhile, again and again, messages of passionate love and sorrow, and he listened to them as sullenly as he did to his two servants, and sent no answer back. And so sat more weary months, in the very prison, it may be in the very room, in which John Bunyan sat nigh six hundred years after: but in a very different frame of mind.