"Is there any one else I must not ask?" he said in a bewildered way.
"Best not ask the abbot," I said, and I could not help smiling.
"Now you are laughing at me, and that is too bad. How am I to know your court ways?"
"Well, you will not have to fight me unless you really want to pick a quarrel. So it does not matter. Get to the bottom of the question, and then come and talk it over, and we will see what is to be done."
He nodded and left me, and I had a good chuckle over the whole business. It was not likely that Elfrida had set him on me, in the least; but I suppose he had heard some jest of her father's, who was one of those who will work anything that pleases them to the last.
So I went my way, and saw to one or two things, and sat me down in the room off the hall that had been Owen's, and presently Erpwald came in, and I saw that he was in trouble.
"Well," I said, "how goes the quarrel?"
"I am a fool," he replied promptly. "The lady should be proud of the affair, and the more it is talked of the better she should like it. You are right in saying that it cannot be stopped. Why, there is a gleeman down the street this minute singing the deeds of Oswald and Elfrida. As for the vow you made, the ealdorman says that it could not have been better done. Forgive me for troubling you about it at all."
He held out his broad hand, and for a moment I hesitated about taking it. He bore his father's name, but in a flash it came to me that I was wrong. We were both children when the ill deed was wrought, and I was no heathen to hold a blood feud against all the family of the wrongdoer. He did not even know that one of us lived, and, as the king had told me, I knew that he was prepared to make amends.
So I took his hand frankly, and he had not noticed the moment's slowness or, if he did, took it for the passing of vexation from my mind.