Evening was drawing on and Beniah was sitting on a stool beside his open door, enjoying the sunshine that penetrated his umbrageous retreat, and reading the papyrus scroll already referred to, when the figure of a woman approached him with timid, hesitating steps. At first the Hebrew did not observe her, but, as she drew nearer, the crackling of branches under her light footsteps aroused him. He looked up quickly, and the woman, running forward, stood before him with clasped hands.
“Oh! sir,” she exclaimed, “have pity on me! I come to claim your protection.”
“Such protection as you need and I can give you shall have, my daughter; but it is a strange request to make of such a man, in such a place, and at such a time. Moreover, your voice is not quite strange to me,” added the old man with a perplexed look. “Surely I have heard it before?”
“Ay, Beniah, you know my voice and have seen my face,” said the woman, suddenly removing her shawl and revealing to the astonished eyes of the old man the pretty head and face of Branwen with her wealth of curling auburn hair.
“Child,” exclaimed the Hebrew, rising and letting fall his roll, while he took her hand in both of his, “what folly have you been guilty of, for surely nothing but folly could move you thus to forsake the house of your friends?”
“Ay, father, you say truth,” returned the girl, her courage returning as she noted the kindly tone of the old man’s voice. “Folly is indeed the cause of it, but it is the folly of man, not of women.”
Branwen then gave him a detailed account of the duel between Bladud and Gunrig, as well as of the subsequent proceedings of the latter, with regard to herself.
The face of the old man elongated as she proceeded with her narration, and as it was long by nature—the face, not the narration—its appearance when she had concluded was solemnising in the extreme.
“Assuredly you are right, my child, for it is amazing folly in such a man as Gunrig to suppose he is a fitting mate for you,—though it is no folly in him to wish to get you for a wife,—and it is no folly in you to flee from such an undesirable union. But how to help you in this matter is more difficult to conceive than anything that has puzzled my brain since the day I left Tyre.”
“Can you not conceal me here till we have time to think what is best to be done?” asked Branwen simply, “for I will die rather than wed this—this monster Gunrig!”