A roar of hideous sound—a confusion of overturned lights, of screeching servants, of writhing struggling bodies—above it all, the vision of that glittering axe poised in the air—then flashing downward,—Randalin’s recollections blurred, ran together, and faded out in broken snatches. She recalled a brief space of something like sleep-walking as the soldiers led her through branching corridors to this room, and fetched for her attendant the only woman available, a wench they had taken from trencher-washing in the royal kitchen. She remembered irritably rejecting the woman’s clumsy services and sending her to sleep on her pallet, while she herself walked to and fro with her surging thoughts until sheer physical exhaustion forced her to throw herself upon the bed. After that she remembered—nothing. “I am glad that I did not disgrace my kin by screaming or fainting,” she reflected now, as she raised herself stiffly. “I am glad I did that much credit to my name.” She flushed as her hand, touching the pillow, found it wet, and for an instant the bearing of her head was less erect. “I do not remember what I dreamed,” she murmured, “but full well I know that it was not because Norman Leofwinesson is slain that I shed tears in my sleep.” For a while she drooped there, her eyes on the open window, outside of which a robin was singing blithely among the cherries. But all at once she seized the pillow with a kind of fierceness, and turned it over and piled the others on top of it, crying under her breath, “How dared he! How dared he! I will shed no tears for him while I am awake. I will remember only that I am my father’s daughter and the Lady of Avalcomb.” Proudly as became an odal-woman, she followed the page when he came at last to call her to the royal presence. The great stone hall in which the King awaited the arrival of his Norman bride was the same room in which he had feasted the night before, but tables and dishes now were gone, gold-weighted tapestries hung once more over the door by which Eric of Norway had made his entrance, and a rich-hued rug from an Eastern loom lay over the spot where she had seen the axe rise and fall. Crossing the threshold, the commonplaceness of it all clashed so discordantly with the scene in her memory that for an instant she grew faint and clung to the curtains between which she was passing. That death should leave so little trace, that the spot which one night was occupied by a headsman, the next, should hold a bride, made her fancy reel with horror even while she pulled herself together sternly.