He had been largely employed by both princes on the continent, in diplomatic as well as military capacities; had visited Provence, the court of poetry and minstrelsy, and the _gai science_; had dwelt in the Norman courts of Italy, and even in Rome herself, then the seat of all the rising schools of literature, art, and science; and while acquiring, almost of necessity, the tongues of southern Europe, had both softened and enlarged his mind by not a few of their acquirements. Of this advantage, however, it was only of late years, when she was bursting into the fairest dawn of adolescence, that she had been permitted to profit; for, between her fifth and her fifteenth years, she had seen but little of her father, who, constantly employed, either as a statesman at home, an embassador abroad, or a conquering invader of the wild Welsh marches, or the wilder and more barbarous shores of Ireland, had rarely been permitted to call a day his own, much less to devote himself to those home duties and pleasures for which he was, beyond doubt, more than ordinarily qualified. Yet, however unfortunate she might have been in this particular, she had been as happy in other respects, and had been brought up under circumstances which had produced no better consequences on her head than on her heart, on the graces of her mind and body, than on the formation of her feminine and gentle character. CHAPTER IX. GUENDOLEN. "The sweetest lady of the time,-- Well worthy of the golden prime Of good Haroun Alraschid." ALFRED TENNYSON. A sister of Guendolen's departed mother, Abbess of St. Hilda, a woman of unusual intellect, and judgment, character and feelings, in no degree inferior to her talents, had taken charge of her orphan niece immediately after the mother's death, and had brought her up, a flower literally untouched by the sun as by the storms of the world, in the serene and tranquil life of the cloister, when the cloister was indeed the seat of piety, and purity, and peace; in some cases the only refuge from the violence and savage lusts of those rugged days; never then the abode, at least in England, of morose bigotry or fierce fanaticism, but the home of quiet contemplation, of meek virtue, and peaceful cheerfulness. The monasteries and priories of those days were not the sullen gaols of the soul, the hives of drones, or the schools of ignorance and bitter sectarian persecution which they have become in these latter days, nor were their inmates then immured as the tenants of the dungeon cell.