oth,
her darling. For the rest of her sons were stalwart and strong of frame,
and in their infancy she had known not a mother's fears. But Wolnoth had
come into the world before his time, and sharp had been the travail of
the mother, and long between life and death the struggle of the newborn
babe. And his cradle had been rocked with a trembling knee, and his
pillow been bathed with hot tears. Frail had been his childhood--a thing
that hung on her care; and now, as the boy grew, blooming and strong,
into youth, the mother felt that she had given life twice to her child.
Therefore was he more dear to her than the rest; and, therefore, as she
gazed upon him now, fair and smiling, and hopeful, she mourned for him
more than for Sweyn, the outcast and criminal, on his pilgrimage of woe,
to the waters of Jordan, and the tomb of our Lord. For Wolnoth, selected
as the hostage for the faith of his house, was to be sent from her arms
to the Court of William the Norman. And the youth smiled and was gay,
choosing vestment and mantle, and ateghars of gold, that he might be
flaunting and brave in the halls of knighthood and the beauty,--the
school of the proudest chivalry of the Christian world. Too young, and
too thoughtless, to share the wise hate of his elders for the manners and
forms of the foreigners, their gaiety and splendour, as his boyhood had
seen them, relieving the gloom of the cloister court, and contrasting the
spleen and the rudeness of the Saxon temperament, had dazzled his fancy
and half Normanised his mind. A proud and happy boy was he, to go as
hostage for the faith, and representative of the rank, of his mighty
kinsmen; and step into manhood in the eyes of the dames of Rouen.

By Wolnoth's side stood his young sister, Thyra, a mere infant; and her
innocent sympathy with her brother's pleasure in gaud and toy saddened
Githa yet more.

"O my son!" said the troubled mother, "why, of all my children, have they
chosen thee? Harold is wise against danger, and Tostig is fierce against
foes, and Gurth is too loving to awake hate in the sternest, and from the
mirth of sunny Leofwine sorrow glints aside, as the shaft from the sheen
of a shield. But thou, thou, O beloved!--cursed be the king that chose
thee, and cruel was the father that forgot the light of the mother's
eyes!"

"Tut, mother the dearest," said Wolnoth, pausing from the contemplation
of a silk robe, all covered with broidered peacocks, which had b