“Won’t you step in?” he said.
“No, I’ll stop out!” she replied, and sat herself doggedly down, with the air of one who had resolved never more to go away.
Meanwhile, in the breakfast room of the palace, which was on the ground floor—indeed, all the rooms of the palace were on the ground floor, for there was no upper one—the queen and her fair daughter Hafrydda were entertaining a stranger who had arrived the day before.
He was an exceedingly handsome man of about six-and-twenty; moderately tall and strong, but with an air of graceful activity in all his movements that gave people, somehow, the belief that whatever he chose to attempt he could do. Both his olive complexion and his tongue betokened him a foreigner, for although the language he spoke was Albionic, it was what we now style broken—very much broken indeed. With a small head, short curly black hair, a very young beard, and small pointed moustache, fine intellectual features, and an expression of imperturbable good-humour, he presented an appearance which might have claimed the regard of any woman. At all events the queen had formed a very high opinion of him—and she was a woman of much experience, having seen many men in her day. Hafrydda, though, of course, not so experienced, fully equalled her mother, if she did not excel her, in her estimate of the young stranger.
As we should be unintelligible if we gave the youth’s words in the broken dialect, we must render his speech in fair English.
“I cannot tell how deeply I am grieved to hear this dreadful news of my dear friend,” he said, with a look of profound sorrow that went home to the mother’s heart.
“And did you really come to this land for the sole purpose of seeing my dear boy?” asked the queen.
“I did. You cannot imagine how much we loved each other. We were thrown together daily—almost hourly. We studied together; we competed when I was preparing for the Olympic games; we travelled in Egypt and hunted together. Indeed, if it had not been for my dear old mother, we should have travelled to this land in the same ship.”
“Your mother did not wish you to leave her, I suppose?”
“Nay, it was I who would not leave her. Her unselfish nature would have induced her to make any sacrifice to please me. It was only when she died that my heart turned with unusual longing to my old companion Bladud, and I made up my mind to quit home and traverse the great sea in search of him.”