The Countess Emma, with Eadgyth and her ladies, ascended to the battlements of the keep to view the encampment of the foe, and in sooth the sight would have been gay enough if it had not borne so dire a meaning. Groups of glittering horsemen, their long lances decked with many-coloured pennons gleaming in the golden light, their horses curveting and prancing, were riding hither and thither, directing and superintending. Long lines of bowmen and slingers were advancing in order at a quick march, wheeling and breaking into companies as they reached the camping ground. Trains of sumpter mules and squires with led horses mingled with the infantry; and shouts and laughter, the braying of trumpets and neighing of horses, mixed fitfully in the soft south wind. Sometimes even the words were audible as some man-at-arms shouted to his followers, and the blows of the mallets with which the poles of the pavilions were being driven into the ground came sharply through the air. The tents themselves were decked with richly-hued silks, and soon displayed the banners of their noble owners. As the twilight deepened, some hundreds of watchfires threw out bright flames into the dusk, and made the air fragrant with their sweet wood smoke, seeming to blaze the brighter as the curfew boomed forth from the church towers in Norwich, to bid all the inhabitants of humble rank rake out their cheerful hearths. All 'the pomp and circumstance of glorious war,' as it was known in those days, was spread out before Blauncheflour, and, as Emma watched the doings of her foe, there rose in her spirit that wild and mysterious 'rapture of battle,' which modern Darwinians explain by tracing back our lineage to tiger forefathers,--that strange yearning to dare all and spend life itself in one great effort, which some have said is but the endeavour to satisfy our instinct to grapple with abstract evil by personifying it in the form of a human foe; but which others define, perhaps more truly, as the final efflorescence of egotism run riot, which satisfies its lust of power even at the cost of destruction to itself. Good or bad, the feeling flooded Emma's heart. At sight of real danger, menacing and close, she who had fainted at the thought of it grew bold as any of the belted knights in the hostile host below. The blood of her hero father coursed swiftly through her veins, and the wild battle-song of Rollo, which had served her ancestors so often as a national hymn, haunted her brain. She had ascended one of the small flights of steps at the angle of the battlements, which served to raise the sentinel above the merlons. Eadgyth stood beside her, and the ladies and knights in attendance were all busily watching the encamping foe through the embrasures, and were out of earshot. Emma stretched out her right hand with its small fingers tightly clenched, and shook it at the beleaguering host. [Illustration: Emma's first sight of the Foe.]