"No, lady, no," cried the girl, who had been hitherto silenced and overpowered by the impulsive vehemence of Guendolen. "You misapprehend me altogether. It is not I whom he rejected, for that _he_ was free; but liberty that he cast from him, as a toy not worth the having, because I might not be free with him--I, and his aged mother, of whom he is, alone, the only stay and comfort." "Noble! noble!" cried the Norman girl, joyously clapping her hands together. "Noble and glorious, gentle and great! This, this, indeed, is true nobility! Why do we Normans boast ourselves, as if we alone could think great thoughts, or do great deeds? and here we are outdone, beyond all question or comparison, in the true gentleness of perfect chivalry; and that, by a Saxon slave. But be of good cheer, Edith, my sister and my friend; be of good cheer. The sun shall not go down looking upon you still a slave, nor upon your Kenric, nor yet upon his mother. You shall be free, all free, free as the blessed winds of heaven, before the sun set in the sea. And you shall be the wife of no serf, but of a freeman, and a freeholder, in my own manor lands of Kendal upon Kent; and you shall be, God willing, the mother of free Englishmen, to do their lady as leal service as their stout father did before them. Fear nothing, and doubt nothing, Edith; for this shall be, so surely as I am Guendolen of Taillebois. So small a thing as this I can right readily do with my good father, and he as readily with our true friend, noble Sir Philip de Morville. But hark! I hear their horses' hoofs and the whimpering of their hounds in the court-yard. To the bartizan, girl, to the bartizan! Is it they--is it the chase returning?" "It is they, dear lady--your noble sire and Sir Philip, and all the knights who rode forth this morning--all laughing in high merriment and glee! and now they mount the steps--they have entered." "No better moment, then, to press a boon. Fly, girl, be your wishes wings to your speech. I would see my father straightway!" CHAPTER XI. THE LADY'S GAME. "And if she will, she will! you may depend on't." OLD SAYING. It did not prove, in truth, a matter altogether so easy of accomplishment as Guendolen, in her warm enthusiasm and sympathy, had boasted, to effect that small thing, as she had termed it in her thoughtless eagerness, the liberation of three human beings, and the posterity of two, through countless generations, from the curse and degradation of hereditary bondage.