nd firm feet as one both angry and ashamed.

But the carline who had beheld the two with a grin on her wrinkled face
changed aspect also, and cried out fiercely after the damsel, and said:
"What! dost thou flee from the fair young man, and he so kind and soft
with thee, thou jade? Yea, I suppose thou dost fetch and carry for
some mistress who is young and a fool, and who has not yet learned how
to deal with the daughters of thine accursed folk. Ah! if I had but
money to buy some one of you, and a good one, she should do something
else for me than showing her fairness to young men; and I would pay her
for her long legs and her white skin, till she should curse her fate
that she had not been born little and dark-skinned and free, and with
heels un-bloodied with the blood of her back."

Thus she went on, though the damsel was long out of ear-shot of her
curses; and Ralph tarried not to get away from her spiteful babble,
which he now partly understood; and that all those yellow-clad damsels
were thralls to the folk of the Burg; and belike were of the kindred of
those captives late-taken whom he had seen amidst the host at its
entering into the Burg.

So he wandered away thence thinking on what he should do till the sun
was set, and he had come into the open space underneath the walls, and
had gone along it till he came to the East Gate: there he looked around
him a little and found people flowing back from the Great Place,
whereto they had gathered to see the host mustered and the spoil
blessed; then he went on still under the wall, and noted not that here
and there a man turned about to look upon him curiously, for he was
deep in thought, concerning the things which he had seen and heard of,
and pondered much what might have befallen his brethren since they
sundered at the Want-way nigh to the High House of Upmeads. Withal the
chief thing that he desired was to get him away from the Burg, for he
felt himself unfree therein; and he said to himself that if he were
forced to dwell among this folk, that he had better never have stolen
himself away from his father and mother; and whiles even he thought
that he would do his best on the morrow to get him back home to Upmeads
again. But then when he thought of how his life would go in his old
home, there seemed to him a lack, and when he questioned himself as to
what that lack was, straightway he seemed to see that Lady of the
Wildwood standing before the men-at-arms in her