"You are still on the Watling Street," he said harshly. "It is only that
this is the old bed of it that has not been used much since the Bridge
was built. Besides the ford, it leads also to Saint Peter's Monastery on
Thorney--"

Stung with fear, she tried to snatch the lines from him. "I am not going
to a monastery! I am going to the Palace."

As a cliff stands against the fretting of waves, his grasp stood against
hers; and his voice was as immovable as his hand. "Certainly you are
going to a palace, you did not let me carry out my meaning. Adjoining
the Monastery there is a dwelling-place which was once a house for
travellers, that King Edgar himself has slept in--"

"It is a prison you are taking me to!" Her voice rose in a shriek. "It
is a prison! You are mocking me I will scream for help!"

His smile mocked her openly then. "By all means,"--he assented,--"and
see how much it will profit you."

She realized then that walls were for shutting people in as well as for
shutting people out, and she could have screamed for very temper. Yet
she made one more attempt before giving way. Abandoning her struggle for
the lines, she let her little gloved hands alight like fluttering birds
upon his mailed arm, and summoned all the eloquence of her beauty into
her heavenly eyes.

"No, sooner would I trust to you," she murmured. "You could not mistreat
me so! I beseech it of you, take me to the Palace where the King is."

On what she based her belief that he was incapable of thwarting her is
not quite clear, for he had never taken the trouble to hide the fact
that he considered her a nuisance, and her civil marriage with the King
a piece of youthful folly on Canute's part. Sinister satisfaction was in
his tone when he answered her.

"The Palace where the King is," he said, "is the Palace for a Queen."

At first, it seemed that she would either scratch out his eyes or throw
herself from her saddle. But in the end she did neither, for a sense
of her helplessness turned her faint. To one who has always ruled
undisputed, there is something benumbing in the first collision with the
pitiless hand of Force. "If I had the good luck to see a bee caught in a
brier, I should wish your death," she threatened. But she said it under
her breath; and after that, rode with drooping head and eyes that saw
nothing of the scene before her.

When the road had left the fens, it climbed a low hill, beyond which it
entered a wood. A brook was