without such frivolous addition to anger, there was
cause eno' in this marriage thoroughly to complete the alienation between
the King and his brother. It was impossible that one so revengeful as
Tostig should not cherish the deepest animosity, not only against the
people that had rejected, but the new Earl that had succeeded him. In
wedding the sister of this fortunate rival and despoiler, Harold could
not, therefore, but gall him in his most sensitive sores of soul. The
King, thus, formally approved and sanctioned his ejection, solemnly took
part with his foe, robbed him of all legal chance of recovering his
dominions, and, in the words of the bode, "shut him out from Northumbria
for ever." Nor was this even all. Grant his return to England; grant a
reconciliation with Harold; still those abhorred and more fortunate
enemies, necessarily made now the most intimate part of the King's
family, must be most in his confidence, would curb and chafe and
encounter Tostig in every scheme for his personal aggrandisement. His
foes, in a word, were in the camp of his brother.

While gnashing his teeth with a wrath the more deadly because he saw not
yet his way to retribution,--Judith, pursuing the separate thread of her
own cogitations, said:

"And if my sister's lord, the Count of the Normans, had, as rightly he
ought to have, succeeded his cousin the Monk-king, then I should have a
sister on the throne, and thou in her husband a brother more tender than
Harold. One who supports his barons with sword and mail, and gives the
villeins rebelling against them but the brand and the cord."

"Ho!" cried Tostig, stopping suddenly in his disordered strides, "kiss
me, wife, for those words! They have helped thee to power, and lit me to
revenge. If thou wouldst send love to thy sister, take graphium and
parchment, and write fast as a scribe. Ere the sun is an hour older, I
am on my road to Count William."

CHAPTER V.

The Duke of the Normans was in the forest, or park land, of Rouvray, and
his Quens and his knights stood around him, expecting some new proof of
his strength and his skill with the bow. For the Duke was trying some
arrows, a weapon he was ever employed in seeking to improve; sometimes
shortening, sometimes lengthening, the shaft; and suiting the wing of the
feather, and the weight of the point, to the nicest refinement in the law
of mechanics. Gay and debonnair, in the brisk fresh air of the frosty
winte