auty fresher, her heart burning with secret hopes and ambitions, and
the great world where there were towns and a king, and many noble men
and women gathered round him yet to be known. And all these things had
come to her and were now lost--now nothing was left but bitterest
regrets and hatred of all those who had failed her at the last. Hatred
first of all and above all of her great triumphant enemy, and hatred of
the boy king she had loved with a mother's love until now, and cherished
for many years. Hatred too of herself when she recalled the part she had
recently played in Mercia, where she had not disdained to practise all
her fascinating arts on many persons she despised in order to bind them
to her cause, and had thereby given cause to her monkish enemy to charge
her with immodesty. It was with something like hatred too that she
regarded her own child when he would come crying to her, begging her to
take him to his beloved brother; carried away with sudden rage, she
would strike and thrust him violently from her, then order her women to
take him away and keep him out of her sight.

Three years had gone by, during which she had continued living alone at
Corfe, still under a cloud and nursing her bitter revengeful feeling in
her heart, until that fatal afternoon on the eighteenth day of March,
978.

The young king, now in his seventeenth year, had come to these favourite
hunting-grounds of his late father, and was out hunting on that day. He
had lost sight of his companions in a wood or thicket of thorn and
furze, and galloping in search of them he came out from the wood on the
further side; and there before him, not a mile away, was Corfe Castle,
his old beloved home, and the home still of the two beings he loved best
in the world--his step-mother and his little half-brother. And although
he had been sternly warned that they were his secret enemies, that it
would be dangerous to hold any intercourse with them, the sight of the
castle and his craving to look again on their dear faces overcame his
scruples. There would be no harm, no danger to him and no great
disobedience on his part to ride to the gates and see and greet them
without dismounting.

When Elfrida was told that Edward himself was at the gates calling to
her and Ethelred to come out to him she became violently excited, and
cried out that God himself was on her side, and had delivered the boy
into her hands. She ordered her servants to go out and pers