Elfrida, who had witnessed this display from her seat, burst out laughing, then said to herself: O how I love these two beautiful boys almost with an equal love, albeit one is not mine! But Edward must be ever dear to me because of his sweetness and his love of me and, even more, his love and tender care of my darling. Yet am I not wholly free from an anxious thought of the distant future. Ah, no, let me not think of such a thing! This sweet child of a boy-father and girl-mother--the frail mother that died in her teens--he can never grow to be a proud, masterful, ambitious man--never aspire to wear his father's crown! Edgar's first-born, it is true, but not mine, and he can never be king. For Edgar and I are one; is it conceivable that he should oppose me in this--that we that are one in mind and soul shall at the last be divided and at enmity? Have we not said it an hundred times that we are one? One in all things except in passion. Yet this very coldness in me in which I differ from others is my chief strength and glory, and has made our two lives one life. And when he is tired and satiated with the common beauty and the common passions of other women he returns to me only to have his first love kindled afresh, and when in love and pity I give myself to him and am his bride afresh as when first he had my body in his arms, it is to him as if one of the immortals had stooped to a mortal, and he tells me I am the flower of womankind and of the world, that my white body is a perfect white flower, my hair a shining gold flower, my mouth a fragrant scarlet flower, and my eyes a sacred blue flower, surpassing all others in loveliness. And when I have satisfied him, and the tempest in his blood has abated, then for the rapture he has had I have mine, when, ashamed at his violence, as if it had been an insult to me, he covers his face with my hair and sheds tears of love and contrition on my breasts. O nothing can ever disunite us! Even from the first, before I ever saw him, when he was coming to me I knew that we were destined to be one. And he too knew it from the moment of seeing me, and knew that I knew it; and when he sat at meat with us and looked smilingly at the friend of his bosom and spoke merrily to him, and resolved at the same time to take his life, he knew that by so doing he would fulfil my desire, and as my knowledge of the betrayal was first, so the desire to shed that abhorred blood was in me first. Nevertheless, I cannot be free of all anxious thoughts, and fear too of my implacable enemy and traducer who from a distance watches all my movements, who reads Edgar's mind even as he would a book, and what he finds there writ by me he seeks to blot out; and thus does he ever thwart me. But though I cannot measure my strength against his, it will not always be so, seeing that he is old and I am young, with Time and Death on my side, who will like good and faithful servants bring him to the dust, so that my triumph must come.