ave it on
hand to see my sister, ere confessor, or monk, or schoolman, claim her
hours!"

"Not so, Harold," said the Earl, briefly. "My daughter is now in her
oratory, and we shall have time enow to treat of things mundane ere she
is free to receive thee, and to preach to thee of things ghostly, the
last miracle at St. Alban's, or the last dream of the King, who would be
a great man and a stirring, if as restless when awake as he is in his
sleep. Come."

Harold, in that filial obedience which belonged, as of course, to his
antique cast of character, made no farther effort to escape, but with a
sigh followed Godwin into one of the contiguous chambers.

"Harold," then said Earl Godwin, after closing the door carefully, "thou
must not let the King keep thee longer in dalliance and idleness: thine
earldom needs thee without delay. Thou knowest that these East Angles,
as we Saxons still call them, are in truth mostly Danes and Norsemen;
people jealous and fierce, and free, and more akin to the Normans than to
the Saxons. My whole power in England hath been founded, not less on my
common birth with the freefolk of Wessex--Saxons like myself, and
therefore easy for me, a Saxon, to conciliate and control--than on the
hold I have ever sought to establish, whether by arms or by arts, over
the Danes in the realm. And I tell and I warn thee, Harold, as the
natural heir of my greatness, that he who cannot command the stout hearts
of the Anglo-Danes, will never maintain the race of Godwin in the post
they have won in the vanguard of Saxon England."

"This I wot well, my father," answered Harold; "and I see with joy, that
while those descendants of heroes and freemen are blended indissolubly
with the meeker Saxon, their freer laws and hardier manners are gradually
supplanting, or rather regenerating, our own."

Godwin smiled approvingly on his son, and then his brow becoming serious,
and the dark pupil of his blue eye dilating, he resumed:

"This is well, my son; and hast thou thought also, that while thou art
loitering in these galleries, amidst the ghosts of men in monk cowls,
Siward is shadowing our House with his glory, and all north the Humber
rings with his name? Hast thou thought that all Mercia is in the hands
of Leofric our rival, and that Algar his son, who ruled Wessex in my
absence, left there a name so beloved, that had I stayed a year longer,
the cry had been 'Algar', not 'Godwin'?--for so is the multitude ev