As the Lady willed, so must I do, for our King's sake, and for the sake of other some. In my boyhood I had been one year a henchman of Godwin her father's; Gytha her mother had nursed me in some slight sickness; I had ridden out with Sweyn to fight with Griffith the Welsh king. I had not seen this Edith since she was a young maiden in her father's hall: men had told of her as both merry and learned; but I had never been near her, to speak one word. It was said that she led a gleeless life with her pious old lord. She would not pass right before my door, I deemed, on her way to the Hereford: I would take food and drink, and meet her upon the road that runs through Ledbury to Gloucester, and ride with her some deal of her journey, if she should wish for my company. So I set out about the ninth hour of the morning, with four of my men: my good wife, thy grandmother, I bade abide within doors, for fear of the deadly heat. We bore with us a pie and wheaten bread--no butter, for it would have melted. Little beer and no cider had I by then; but we took two skins of ripe mead, fit for queen or king. The sun was shining so strongly that we could almost hear the shooting of his beams. The air was seen to throb. White dust lay thickly over grass, bush and tree. There was a dreadful stillness; the only sound that ourselves made not was the sickening hum of flies. We went slowly, with bracken-leaves bound about our heads and twined within our horses' browbands. When we had gone some two miles, there befell a great mishap. The stopper flew from the mead-flask at the saddle-bow of Anflete the reeve, and the mead gushed out. We had not time to catch any of it ere it lay frothing in the dust. And then, as though the devil strove to plague us, the other bottle, which mine own horse carried, burst also, and left us likewise liquorless. But we bore on, until we came to a spot a few yards off the Ledbury highway, where the banks were steep and the bushes shady: indeed, all about was the woodland of the vill of Stoke, belonging to this same Edith the Lady, who had set a reeve therein to see to her rights and her profits. Seemingly she would not stay to look upon her own land, so fain was she for sight of Harold her brother. Near the joining of the ways, then, we waited. Our throats were as dry as a smith's bellows. My men had swallowed what little beer we had left before I could forbid them. At once I made the blockheads seek for water, thinking of the wants of those we had come to meet. Not one drop within a hundred yards in every quarter, though God knows there are springs and streams enough thereabouts in any common year! We stretched ourselves in what there was of shade, and soon we beheld them coming, a goodly company of ladies and armed men. We went forward to greet them; the foremost of them got down from their saddles; the Lady of the English came stately towards me, smiled, and put her small hand in mine.