But when, after a few months, Hereward returned from his first campaign in Holland, covered with glory and renown, all smiles, and beauty, and health, and good-humor, and gratitude for the magic armor which had preserved him unhurt, then Torfrida forgot all her fears, and thought herself the happiest maid alive for four-and-twenty hours at least. And then came back, and after that again and again, the old fears. Gradually she found out that the sneers which she had heard at English barbarians were not altogether without ground. Not only had her lover’s life been passed among half-brutal and wild adventurers; but, like the rest of his nation, he had never felt the influence of that classic civilization without which good manners seem, even to this day, almost beyond the reach of the white man. Those among whom she had been brought up, whether soldiers or clerks, were probably no nobler or purer at heart--she would gladly have believed them far less so--than Hereward; but the merest varnish of Roman civilization had given a charm to their manners, a wideness of range to their thoughts, which Hereward had not. Especially when he had taken too much to drink,--which he did, after the Danish fashion, far oftener than the rest of Baldwin’s men,--he grew rude, boastful, quarrelsome. He would chant his own doughty deeds, and “gab,” as the Norman word was, in painful earnest, while they gabbed only in sport, and outvied each other in impossible fanfaronades, simply to laugh down a fashion which was held inconsistent with the modesty of a true knight. Bitter it was to her to hear him announcing to the company, not for the first or second time, how he had slain the Cornish giant, whose height increased by a foot at least every time he was mentioned; and then to hear him answered by some smart, smooth-shaven youth, who, with as much mimicry of his manner as he dared to assume, boasted of having slain in Araby a giant with two heads, and taken out of his two mouths the two halves of the princess whom he was devouring, which being joined together afterwards by the prayers of a holy hermit, were delivered back safe and sound to her father the King of Antioch. And more bitter still, to hear Hereward angrily dispute the story, unaware (at least at first) that he was being laughed at. Then she grew sometimes cold, sometimes contemptuous, sometimes altogether fierce; and shed bitter tears in secret, when she was complimented on the modesty of her young savage. But she was a brave maiden; and what was more, she loved him with all her heart. Else why endure bitter words for his sake? And she set herself to teach and train the wild outlaw into her ideal of a very perfect knight.