to the lap of the waves, and
strain her beautiful eyes through the darkness for the sails of the ship
that should bring the two that she loved safe home again. But when the
day came when the King, her father, returned, and led through the gate
the lady who was his bride, there were many who knew that it would have
been well for the Princess had she still been left in her loneliness.
Gracious indeed was her welcome to her mother's supplanter, for she
loved her father, and this was the wife of his choice.

"Oh! welcome, father," she said, and handed to him the keys of the
castle of which she had kept such faithful ward, and, holding up a face
as fresh and fragrant as a wild rose at the dawn of a June day, she
kissed her step-mother.

"Welcome, my step-mother," she said, "for all that's here is yours."

Many a gallant Northumbrian lord was there that day, and many a lord
from the southern land was in the King's noble retinue. One of them it
was who spoke what the others thought, and to the handsome Queen who had
listened already overmuch to the praises her husband sang of his
daughter, the Princess Margaret, the words were as acid in a wound.
"Meseemeth," said he, "that in all the north country there is no lady so
fair, nor none so good as this most beautiful Princess."

Proudly the Queen drew herself up, and from under drooped eyelids, with
the look of a hawk as it swoops for its prey, she made answer to the
lord from the south.

"I am the Queen," she said; "ye might have excepted me." Then, turning
swift, like a texel that strikes its quarry, she said to the Princess:
"A laidley worm shalt thou be, crawling amongst the rocks; a laidley
worm shalt thou stay until thy brother, Wynd, comes home again."

So impossible seemed such a threat to the Princess that her red lips
parted over her white teeth, and she laughed long and merrily. But those
who knew that the new Queen had studied long all manner of wicked spells
and cruel magic were filled with dread, for greatly they feared that the
fair Princess's joyous days were done.

The Farne Islands were purple-black in a chill grey sea, and the waves
that beat on the rocks beneath the castle seemed to have a more dolorous
moan than common when next evening came. The joyous Princess, jingling
her big bunch of keys and smiling a welcome to her father's guests, had
gone as completely as though she lay buried beside the drowned mariners,
for whom the silting sand under the wav