on over the sale of England. Every light laugh in the proverbial
ease of the social Normans rang on his ear like the joy of a ghastly
Sabbat. All his senses preternaturally sharpened to that magnetic
keenness in which we less hear and see than conceive and divine, the
lowest murmur William breathed in the ear of Odo boomed clear to his own;
the slightest interchange of glance between some dark-browed priest and
large-breasted warrior, flashed upon his vision. The irritation of his
recent and neglected wound combined with his mental excitement to
quicken, yet to confuse, his faculties. Body and soul were fevered. He
floated, as it were, between a delirium and a dream.

Late in the evening he was led into the chamber where the Duchess sat
alone with Adeliza and her second son William--a boy who had the red hair
and florid hues of the ancestral Dane, but was not without a certain bold
and strange kind of beauty, and who, even in childhood, all covered with
broidery and gems, betrayed the passion for that extravagant and
fantastic foppery for which William the Red King, to the scandal of
Church and pulpit, exchanged the decorous pomp of his father's
generation. A formal presentation of Harold to the little maid was
followed by a brief ceremony of words, which conveyed what to the
scornful sense of the Earl seemed the mockery of betrothal between infant
and bearded man. Glozing congratulations buzzed around him; then there
was a flash of lights on his dizzy eyes, he found himself moving through
a corridor between Odo and William. He was in his room hung with arras
and strewed with rushes; before him in niches, various images of the
Virgin, the Archangel Michael, St. Stephen, St. Peter, St. John, St.
Valery; and from the bells in the monastic edifice hard by tolled the
third watch [201] of the night--the narrow casement was out of reach,
high in the massive wall, and the starlight was darkened by the great
church tower. Harold longed for air. All his earldom had he given at
that moment, to feel the cold blast of his native skies moaning round his
Saxon wolds. He opened his door, and looked forth. A lanthorn swung on
high from the groined roof of the corridor. By the lanthorn stood a tall
sentry in arms, and its gleam fell red upon an iron grate that jealously
closed the egress. The Earl closed the door, and sat down on his bed,
covering his face with his clenched hand. The veins throbbed in every
pulse, his own t