; only in the forest,
the grey wings of the owl, fluttering heavily across the glades; only in
the grass, the red eyes of the bloated toad.

Then Hilda went slowly home, and the maids worked all night at the
charmed banner. All that night, too, the watch-dogs howled in the yard,
through the ruined peristyle--howled in rage and in fear. And under the
lattice of the room in which the maids broidered the banner, and the
Prophetess muttered her charm, there couched, muttering also, a dark,
shapeless thing, at which those dogs howled in rage and in fear.

CHAPTER II.

All within the palace of Westminster showed the confusion and dismay of
the awful time;--all, at least, save the council-chamber, in which
Harold, who had arrived the night before, conferred with his thegns. It
was evening: the courtyards and the halls were filled with armed men, and
almost with every hour came rider and bode from the Sussex shores. In
the corridors the Churchmen grouped and whispered, as they had whispered
and grouped in the day of King Edward's death. Stigand passed among
them, pale and thoughtful. The serge gowns came rustling round the
archprelate for counsel or courage.

"Shall we go forth with the King's army?" asked a young monk, bolder than
the rest, "to animate the host with prayer and hymn?"

"Fool!" said the miserly prelate, "fool! if we do so, and the Norman
conquer, what become of our abbacies and convent lands? The Duke wars
against Harold, not England. If he slay Harold----"

"What then?"

"The Atheling is left us yet. Stay we here and guard the last prince of
the House of Cerdic," whispered Stigand, and he swept on.

In the chamber in which Edward had breathed his last, his widowed Queen,
with Aldyth, her successor, and Githa and some other ladies, waited the
decision of the council. By one of the windows stood, clasping each
other by the hand, the fair young bride of Gurth and the betrothed of the
gay Leofwine. Githa sate alone, bowing her face over her
hands--desolate; mourning for the fate of her traitor son; and the
wounds, that the recent and holier death of Thyra had inflicted, bled
afresh. And the holy lady of Edward attempted in vain, by pious
adjurations, to comfort Aldyth, who, scarcely heeding her, started ever
and anon with impatient terror, muttering to herself, "Shall I lose this
crown too?"

In the council-hall debate waxed warm,--which was the wiser, to meet
William at once in the batt