Hereward looked at her majestic face, once lovely, now careworn, and trembled for a moment. Had there been any tenderness in it, his history might have been a very different one; but alas! there was none. Not that she was in herself untender; but that her great piety (call it not superstition, for it was then the only form known or possible to pure and devout souls) was so outraged by this, or even by the slightest insult to that clergy whose willing slave she had become, that the only method of reclaiming the sinner had been long forgotten, in genuine horror at his sin. “Is it not enough,” she went on, sternly, “that you should have become the bully and the ruffian of all the fens?--that Hereward the leaper, Hereward the wrestler, Hereward the thrower of the hammer--sports, after all, only fit for the sons of slaves--should be also Hereward the drunkard, Hereward the common fighter, Hereward the breaker of houses, Hereward the leader of mobs of boon companions which bring back to us, in shame and sorrow, the days when our heathen forefathers ravaged this land with fire and sword? Is it not enough for me that my son should be a common stabber--?” “Whoever called me stabber to you, lies. If I have killed men, or had them killed, I have done it in fair fight.” But she went on unheeding,--“Is it not enough, that, after having squandered on your fellows all the money that you could wring from my bounty, or win at your brutal sports, you should have robbed your own father, collected his rents behind his back, taken money and goods from his tenants by threats and blows; but that, after outraging them, you must add to all this a worse sin likewise,--outraging God, and driving me--me who have borne with you, me who have concealed all for your sake--to tell your father that of which the very telling will turn my hair to gray?” “So you will tell my father?” said Hereward, coolly. “And if I should not, this monk himself is bound to do so, or his superior, your Uncle Brand.” “My Uncle Brand will not, and your monk dare not.” “Then I must. I have loved you long and well; but there is one thing which I must love better than you: and that is, my conscience and my Maker.” “Those are two things, my lady mother, and not one; so you had better not confound them. As for the latter, do you not think that He who made the world is well able to defend his own property,--if the lands and houses and cattle and money which these men wheedle and threaten and forge out of you and my father are really His property, and not merely their plunder? As for your conscience, my lady mother, really you have done so many good deeds in your life, that it might be beneficial to you to do a bad one once in a way, so as to keep your soul in a wholesome state of humility.” The monk groaned aloud. Lady Godiva groaned; but it was inwardly. There was silence for a moment. Both were abashed by the lad’s utter shamelessness.