s, kneel, O my son, with me, and pray that a life of truth and
virtue may atone the madness of an hour."

So by the crucifix knelt the warrior and the priest.

CHAPTER II.

All other thought had given way to Harold's impetuous yearning to throw
himself upon the Church, to hear his doom from the purest and wisest of
its Saxon preachers. Had the prelate deemed his vow irrefragable, he
would have died the Roman's death, rather than live the traitor's life;
and strange indeed was the revolution created in this man's character,
that he, "so self-dependent," he who had hitherto deemed himself his sole
judge below of cause and action, now felt the whole life of his life
committed to the word of a cloistered shaveling. All other thought had
given way to that fiery impulse--home, mother, Edith, king, power,
policy, ambition! Till the weight was from his soul, he was as an outlaw
in his native land. But when the next sun rose, and that awful burthen
was lifted from his heart and his being--when his own calm sense,
returning, sanctioned the fiat of the priest,--when, though with deep
shame and rankling remorse at the memory of the vow, he yet felt
exonerated, not from the guilt of having made, but the deadlier guilt of
fulfilling it--all the objects of existence resumed their natural
interest, softened and chastened, but still vivid in the heart restored
to humanity. But from that time, Harold's stern philosophy and stoic
ethics were shaken to the dust; re-created, as it were, by the breath of
religion, he adopted its tenets even after the fashion of his age. The
secret of his shame, the error of his conscience, humbled him. Those
unlettered monks whom he had so despised, how had he lost the right to
stand aloof from their control! how had his wisdom, and his strength, and
his courage, met unguarded the hour of temptation!

Yes, might the time come, when England could spare him from her side!
when he, like Sweyn the outlaw, could pass a pilgrim to the Holy
Sepulchre, and there, as the creed of the age taught, win full pardon for
the single lie of his truthful life, and regain the old peace of his
stainless conscience!

There are sometimes event and season in the life of man the hardest and
most rational, when he is driven perforce to faith the most implicit and
submissive; as the storm drives the wings of the petrel over a
measureless sea, till it falls tame, and rejoicing at refuge, on the
sails of some lonely s