tan's monkish colony, was scarcely sufficient to make a palace of
the rambling rookery which a wall separated from the West Minster. It
was an irregular one-storied building,--or, rather, group of buildings
connected by covered passages,--and every kind of material had been
used in its construction,--brick and stone and wood,--while some of the
smaller offices were even straw-thatched and wattled.

"It is the waste-place of ruins," Elfgiva said on the day of their
arrival, when the monk who guided them proudly identified the brick
portions as fragments of the old Roman Temple to Apollo, the wooden
door-posts as beams from the Saxon Seberht's refectory, and the stone
walls as contributions from Dunstan's chapel, which the Danes of the
year one thousand and twelve had reduced to a crumbling pile.

To-day, a fortnight later, Randalin repeated the comment with a
despondent addition: "It is the waste-place of ruins, and ruins have
come to dwell in it. I can believe that it is no lie about the Fates
to call them women, when they put like with like in so housewifely a
manner."

She was alone in one of the bare mouldering rooms, leaning against the
deep-set small-paned window which had become her accustomed post. It
offered no pleasanter outlook than the snow-powdered thicket beyond
the wall and a glimpse of the Thames, spreading silently over the
surrounding marshes; but from it her fancy's eye could follow the mighty
stream around its eastern bend to the point where the City walls began,
and Saint Paul's shingled steeple reared itself in lofty pride. The
Palace stood in the shade of that steeple,--the real Palace, where the
King sat deciding over the fate of his new subjects, taking their lands
from them, when he did not take their lives, and banishing them across
the sea to live and die in beggary. Her fingers tapped the glass in
desperation as she realized her helplessness even to get news of his
judgments.

"The King will never come to this rubbish heap," she told herself
despairingly. "Here we are buried no less than if we lay in a mound. It
is not likely that we shall get news by an easier way than by going to
him."

Straining her eyes out over the mist-robed river, she tried for the
thousandth time to think of some bait alluring enough to tempt Elfgiva
to that point of daring. Hope the Lady of Northampton had every morning
when she awoke and looked in her mirror, and Wrath lay down with her
every night, but the ra