She heard no more. She turned away, her heart dead within her. She knew all that these words implied, in days when the possession of land was everything to the free man; and the possession of a son necessary, to pass that land on in the ancestral line. Only to have a son; only to prevent the old estate passing, with an heiress, into the hands of strangers, what crimes did not men commit in those days, and find themselves excused for them by public opinion. And now,--her other children (if she ever had any) had died in childhood; the little Torfrida, named after herself, was all that she had brought to Hereward; and he was the last of his house. In him the race of Leofric, of Godiva, of Earl Oslac, would become extinct; and that girl would marry--whom? Whom but some French conqueror,--or at best some English outlaw. In either case Hereward would have no descendants for whom it was worth his while to labor or to fight. What wonder if he longed for a son,--and not a son of hers, the barren tree,--to pass his name down to future generations? It might be worth while, for that, to come in to the king, to recover his lands, to----She saw it all now, and her heart was dead within her. She spent that evening neither eating nor drinking, but sitting over the log embers, her head upon her hands, and thinking over all her past life and love, since she saw him, from the gable window, ride the first time into St. Omer. She went through it all, with a certain stern delight in the self-torture, deliberately day by day, year by year,--all its lofty aspirations, all its blissful passages, all its deep disappointments, and found in it--so she chose to fancy in the wilfulness of her misery--nothing but cause for remorse. Self in all, vanity, and vexation of spirit; for herself she had loved him; for herself she had tried to raise him; for herself she had set her heart on man, and not on God. She had sown the wind: and behold, she had reaped the whirlwind. She could not repent; she could not pray. But oh! that she could die. She was unjust to herself, in her great nobleness. It was not true, not half, not a tenth part true. But perhaps it was good for her that it should seem true, for that moment; that she should be emptied of all earthly things for once, if so she might be filled from above. At last she went into the inner room to lie down and try to sleep. At her feet, under the perch where Hereward’s armor had hung, lay an open letter. She picked it up, surprised at seeing such a thing there, and kneeling down, held it eagerly to the wax candle which was on a spike at the bed’s head. She knew the handwriting in a moment. It was Alftruda’s. This, then, was why Hereward had been so strangely hurried. He must have had that letter, and dropped it. Her eye and mind took it all in, in one instant, as the lightning flash reveals a whole landscape. And then her mind became as dark as that landscape, when the flash is past.