“These plaguy southern winds at their tricks,” muttered at first Earl Gilbert of Gloucester, for he it was who had spoken, though Richard had not known him to be so near; then sitting up, he came to a fuller view: “Hm—it looks ill! Thou canst keep thy feet, Fowen, or what do they call thee? Down with thee to the cabin, and let the Prince know.” Stepping across the prostrate forms, and meeting with vituperations as he trode, Richard made his way to the ladder that led below, and notified his presence behind the curtain that veiled the royal cabin. He was summoned to enter at once. The Prince was endeavouring to write at a swinging-table, the Princess lay white and resigned on a couch, attended on by Dame Idonea (or more properly Iduna) Osbright, a lady who had lost her husband in a former Crusade, and had ever since been a sort of high-born head nurse in the palace. A Danish skald, who had once been at the English court, had said that she seemed to have eaten her namesake’s apple of immortality, without her apple of beauty, for no one could ever remember to have seen her other than a tiny dried-up old witch, with keen gray eyes, a sharp tongue, an ever ready foot and hand, and a frame utterly unaffected by any of the influences so sinister to far younger and stronger ones. Devoted to all the royal family, her special passion was for Prince Edmund, who, in his mother’s repugnance to his deformity, had been left almost entirely to her, and she had accompanied the Princess Eleanor all the more willingly from her desire to look after her favourite nursling. “There, Lady,” said Edward to his wife, “the tossing is all but over; here is Richard come to tell us that we are nigh on land.” “Even so, my Lord,” returned Richard; “we are entering the gulf, but my Lord of Gloucester has sent me to report to you that in all the ships the colours are trailing.” “Sayst thou?” exclaimed the Prince, hastily laying aside his writing materials. “Fear not, _mi Dona_, I will return anon and tell thee how it is. We are in smoother water already.” “So much smoother that I will come with thee out of this stifling cabin,” said Eleanor. “O would that we had been in time for thee to have counselled thine uncles—” “We will see what we have to grieve for ere we bemoan ourselves,” said the Prince. “My good uncle of France would put his whole fleet in mourning for one barefooted friar!” “Depend on it, my Lord, ’tis mourning for something in earnest,” interposed Dame Iduna; “I said it was not for nothing that a single pyot came and rocked up his ill-omened tail while we were taking horse for this expedition, and my Lady there was kissing the little ones at home, nor that a hare ran over our road at Bagshot—” “Well, Dame,” interposed the Prince good-humouredly, seeing his wife somewhat affected by the list of omens, “I know you have a horse-shoe in your luggage, so you will come safe off, whoever does not!”