An irrepressible desire came over the mind of Guendolen, to know and comprehend something more fully the sentiments and sorrows of the girl who had nursed and attended her so gently since her adventure with the stag; and perceiving intuitively that the slave girl, who, strange as it appeared to her, seemed to have a species of pride of her own, would not reveal her inward self in the presence of the vain and flippant Norman waiting girls, she hastened to dismiss them, without wounding their self-esteem, on a pretext of which they would be willing enough to avail themselves. "Lilian and Marguerite," she said, "you must be weary my good girls, with watching me through this long night and my peevish temper must have made you yet more weary, for I feel that I am not myself, and that I have tried your patience. Go, therefore, now, and get some repose, that when I shall truly need your services again, you may be well at ease to serve me. I feel as if I could sleep now; and while I slumber, Edith, here, can watch beside me, and drive away the gnats with her fan, as well as a more experienced bower-woman." Whether the girls suspected or not that their mistress desired to be rid of them, they were not sorry to be dismissed from attendance on her couch; and whether they proposed to devote the opportunity to repose, or to gay flirtation with the pages of their own lord's or of Sir Philip's household, they withdrew at once, leaving the lady gazing fixedly on the motionless and hardly conscious figure of the slave girl. By a sudden impulse she passed her small white hand caressingly over the soft and abundant tresses of Edith's fair hair; and so unusual was the sensation to the daughter of the downfallen race, that she started, as if a blow had been dealt her, and blushed crimson, between surprise and wonder, as she raised her great blue eyes wide open to the face of the young lady. "And is it so hard?" she asked, in reference more to what she understood Edith to mean, than to any thing she had spoken, or even hinted--"is it so hard, my poor child? I had thought that your lot sat as lightly on you as the dew-drop in the chalice of the bluebell. I had fancied you as happy as any one of us here below. Will you not tell me what is this sorrow which weighs on you so heavily? It may be I can do something to relieve it." "Lady, I am, as you know, a Saxon, and a slave, the daughter of a slave, and, should it ever be my lot to wed, the wife, to be, of a serf, a bondman of the soil, and the mother of things doomed, or ere they see the blessed light of Heaven, to the collar and the chain from the cradle to the grave. Think you a woman, with such thoughts as these at her heart, can be very gay or joyous?"