Up to that time, she had regarded them, certainly, on the whole, as a slow, as a somewhat stolid, impassive, and unimpassioned race, less mercurial than her own impetuous, impulsive kindred, and far less liable to strong emotions or keen perceptions, whether of pain or pleasure. The girlish liveliness and gentleness, and even the untaught graces of Edith had, at the first, attracted her; and, as she was thrown a good deal into contact with her, from the fact of her constant attendance on the chambers she occupied, she had become much interested in her, regarding her as one of the happiest, most artless, and innocent little girls she had ever met--one, she imagined, on whom no shadow of grief had ever fallen, and whose humble lot was one of actual contentment, if not of positive enjoyment. Nor, hitherto, insomuch as actual realities were concerned, was Guendolen much in error. Sir Philip de Morville, as has been stated already, was, according to the times and their tenor, a good and considerate lord. His bailiff was a well-intentioned, strict man, intent on having his master's work done to the last straw, but beyond that neither an oppressor nor a tyrant. Kenric, her distant kinsman and betrothed, was confessedly the best man and most favored servant in the quarter; and his mother, who had grown old in the service of Sir Philip's father, whom she had nursed with simple skill through the effects of many a mimic battle in the lists, or real though scarce more dangerous fray, now superannuated, reigned as much the mistress of her son's hearth as though she had been a free woman, and the cot in which she dwelt her freehold. Edith herself was the first bower-maiden of the castle, and, safe under the protecting wings of dame Ulrica, the housewife, defied the impertinence of forward pages, the importunate gallantry of esquires, and was cheerfully acknowledged as the best and prettiest lass of the lot, by the old gray-haired seneschal, in his black velvet suit and gold chain of office. Really, therefore, none of her own immediate family had known any actual wants, or suffered any material hardships or sorrows, through their condition, up to the period at which my tale commences. Their greatest care, perhaps, had arisen from the temper, surly, rude, insolent, and provocative, of Eadwulf the Red, Kenric's brother, who had already, by misconduct, and even actual crime, according to the Norman code, subjected himself to severe penalties, and been reduced, in default of harsher treatment, to the condition of a mere slave, a chattel, saleable like an ox or ass, at the pleasure of their lord. This, both in its actual sense, as keeping them in constant apprehension of what further distress Eadwulf's future misconduct might bring upon them, and in its moral bearing, as holding them constantly reminded of their own servile condition, had been, thus far, their prime grief and cause of complaint, had they been persons given to complain.