In the midst rode Sir Yvo de Taillebois, all armed save his head, which was covered with a velvet mortier with a long drooping feather, and wearing a splendid surcoat; and, by his side, on a fleet Andalusian jennet, in a rich purple habit, furred at the cape and cuffs, and round the waist, with snow-white swansdown, the fair and gentle Guendolen, followed by three or four gay girls of Norman birth, and, happier and fairer than the happiest and fairest, the charming Saxon beauty, pure-minded and honest Edith. Behind these followed a train of baggage vans, cumbrous and lumbering concerns, groaning along heavily on their ill-constructed wheels, and a horse-litter, intended for the use of the lady, if weary or ill at ease, but at the present conveying the aged freed-woman, who was departing, now in well-nigh her ninetieth summer, from the home of her youth, and the graves of her husband and five goodly sons, departing from the house of bondage, to a free new home in the far north-west. The procession was closed by another body of twenty more horse-archers, led by two armed esquires; and with these rode Kenric, close shaven, and his short, cropped locks curling beneath a jaunty blue bonnet, with a heron's feather, wearing doublet and hose of forest green, with russet doeskin buskins, the silver badge of Sir Yvo de Taillebois on his arm, and in his hand the freeman's trusty weapon, the puissant English bow, which did such mighty deeds, and won such _los_ thereafter, at those immortal fields of Cressy and Poictiers, and famous Agincourt. As the procession wound down the long slope of the castle hill, and through the Saxon quarter, the serfs, who had collected to look on the show, set up a loud hurrah, the ancient Saxon cry of mirth, of greeting, or defiance. It was the cry of _caste_, rejoicing at the elevation of a brother to the true station of a man. But there was one voice which swelled not the cry; one man, who turned sullenly away, unable to bear the sight of another's joy, turned away, muttering vengeance--Eadwulf the Red--the only soul so base, even among the fallen and degraded children of servitude and sorrow, as to refuse to be glad at the happiness which it was not granted him to share, though that happiness were a mother's and a brother's escape from misery and degradation. Many days, many weeks, passed away, while that gay cavalcade were engaged in their long progress to the north-westward, through the whole length of the beautiful West Riding of Yorkshire, from its southern frontier, where it abuts on Nottinghamshire and the wild county of Derby, to its western border, where its wide moors and towering crag-crested peaks are blended with the vast treeless fells of Westmoreland. And during all that lengthened but not weary progress, it was but rarely, and then only at short intervals, that they were out of the sight of the umbrageous and continuous forest.