them. Let us return to Harold,--thou
thinkest, then, that he is worthy of his fame?"

"He is almost the only Englishman I have seen," answered De Graville,
"who hath received scholarly rearing and nurture; and all his faculties
are so evenly balanced, and all accompanied by so composed a calm, that
methinks, when I look at and hear him, I contemplate some artful
castle,--the strength of which can never be known at the first glance,
nor except by those who assail it."

"Thou art mistaken, Sire de Graville," said the Duke, with a shrewd and
cunning twinkle of his luminous dark eyes. "For thou tellest me that he
hath no thought of my pretensions to the English throne,--that he
inclines willingly to thy suggestions to come himself to my court for the
hostages,--that, in a word, he is not suspicious."

"Certes, he is not suspicious," returned Mallet.

"And thinkest thou that an artful castle were worth much without warder
or sentry,--or a cultivated mind strong and safe, without its
watchman,--Suspicion?"

"Truly, my lord speaks well and wisely," said the knight, startled; "but
Harold is a man thoroughly English, and the English are a gens the least
suspecting of any created thing between an angel and a sheep."

William laughed aloud. But his laugh was checked suddenly; for at that
moment a fierce yell smote his ears, and looking hastily up, he saw his
hound and his son rolling together on the ground, in a grapple that
seemed deadly. William sprang to the spot; but the boy, who was then
under the dog, cried out, "Laissez aller! Laissez aller! no rescue! I
will master my own foe;" and, so saying, with a vigorous effort he gained
his knee, and with both hands griped the hound's throat, so that the
beast twisted in vain, to and fro, with gnashing jaws, and in another
minute would have panted out its last.

"I may save my good hound now," said William, with the gay smile of his
earlier days, and, though not without some exertion of his prodigious
strength, he drew the dog from his son's grasp.

"That was ill done, father," said Robert, surnamed even then the
Courthose, "to take part with thy son's foe."

"But my son's foe is thy father's property, my vaillant," said the Duke;
"and thou must answer to me for treason in provoking quarrel and feud
with my own fourfooted vavasour."

"It is not thy property, father; thou gavest the dog to me when a whelp."

"Fables, Monseigneur de Courthose; I lent it to thee but f