Torfrida burst into a violent flood of tears, no one knew why. There came over her a vision of the creaking carts, and the little sleek oxen, dove-colored and dove-eyed, with their canvas mantles tied neatly on to keep off heat and flies, lounging on with their light load of vine and olive twigs beneath the blazing southern sun. When should she see the sun once more? She looked up at the brown branches overhead, howling in the December gale, and down at the brown fen below, dying into mist and darkness as the low December sun died down; and it seemed as if her life was dying down with it. There would be no more sun, and no more summers, for her upon this earth. None certainly for her poor old mother. Her southern blood was chilling more and more beneath the bitter sky of Kesteven. The fall of the leaf had brought with it rheumatism, ague, an many miseries. Cunning old leech-wives treated the French lady with tonics, mugwort, and bogbean, and good wine enow, But, like David of old, she got no heat; and before Yule-tide came, she had prayed herself safely out of this world, and into the world to come. And Torfrida’s heart was the more light when she saw her go. She was absorbed utterly in Hereward and his plots. She lived for nothing else; and clung to them all the more fiercely, the more desperate they seemed. So that small band of gallant men labored on, waiting for the Danes, and trying to make artillery and take Lincoln Keep. And all the while--so unequal is fortune when God so wills--throughout the Southern Weald, from Hastings to Hind-head, every copse glared with charcoal-heaps, every glen was burrowed with iron diggings, every hammer-pond stamped and gurgled night and day, smelting and forging English iron, wherewith the Frenchmen might slay Englishmen. William--though perhaps he knew it not himself--had, in securing Sussex and Surrey, secured the then great iron-field of England, and an unlimited supply of weapons; and to that circumstance, it may be, as much as to any other, the success of his campaigns may be due. It must have been in one of these December days that a handful of knights came through the Bruneswold, mud and blood bespattered, urging on tired horses, as men desperate and foredone. And the foremost of them all, when he saw Hereward at the gate of Bourne, leaped down, and threw his arms round his neck and burst into bitter weeping. “Hereward, I know you, though you know me not. I am your nephew, Morcar Algarsson; and all is lost.” As the winter ran on, other fugitives came in, mostly of rank and family. At last Edwin himself came, young and fair, like Morcar; he who should have been the Conqueror’s son-in-law; for whom his true-love pined, as he pined, in vain. Where were Sweyn and his Danes? Whither should they go till he came? “To Ely,” answered Hereward.