Harold gazed on her with mournful fondness; and the bird still sung and the squirrel swung himself again from bough to bough.

Edith spoke first: "My godmother, thy sister, hath sent for me, Harold, and I am to go to the Court to-morrow.

Shalt thou be there ?" "Surely," said Harold, in an anxious voice, "surely, I will be there! So my sister hath sent for thee: wittest thou wherefore ?" Edith grew very pale, and her tone trembled as she answered: "Well-a-day, yes." "It is as I feared, then!" exclaimed Harold, in great agitation; "and my sister, whom these monks have demented, leagues herself with the King against the law of the wide welkin and the grand religion of the human heart.

Oh!" continued the Earl, kindling into an enthusiasm, rare to his even moods, but wrung as much from his broad sense as from his strong affection, "when I compare the Saxon of our land and day, all enervated and decrepit by priestly superstition, with his forefathers in the first Christian era, yielding to the religion they adopted in its simple truths, but not to that rot of social happiness and free manhood which this cold and lifeless monarchism--making virtue the absence of human ties--spreads around--which the great Bede [110], though himself a monk, vainly but bitterly denounced;--yea, verily, when I see the Saxon already the theowe of the priest, I shudder to ask how long he will be folk-free of the tyrant." He paused, breathed hard, and seizing, almost sternly, the girl's trembling arm, he resumed between his set teeth: "So they would have thee be a nun ?--Thou wilt not,--thou durst not,--thy heart would perjure thy vows!" "Ah, Harold!" answered Edith, moved out of all bashfulness by his emotion and her own terror of the convent, and answering, if with the love of a woman, still with all the unconsciousness of a child: "Better, oh better the grate of the body than that of the heart!--In the grave I could still live for those I love; behind the Grate, love itself must be dead.

Yes, thou pitiest me, Harold; thy sister, the Queen, is gentle and kind; I will fling myself at her feet, and say: 'Youth is fond, and the world is fair: let me live my youth, and bless God in the world that he saw was good!'" "My own, own dear Edith!" exclaimed Harold, overjoyed.