"You Englishmen will have to change your minds on many points, if you mean
to stay here."
"We shall not change them, and we shall stay here," quoth the Abbot.
"How? You will not get Sweyn and his Danes to help you a second time."
"No, we shall all die, and give you your wills, and you will not have the
heart to cast our bones into the fens?"
"Not unless you intend to work miracles, and set up for saints, like your
Alphege Edmund."
"Heaven forbid that we should compare ourselves with them! Only let us
alone till we die."
"If you let us alone, and do not turn traitor meanwhile."
Abbot Ulfketyl bit his lip, and kept down the rising fiend.
"And now," said the priest, "deliver me over Torfrida the younger,
daughter of Hereward and this woman, that I may take her to the King, who
has found a fit husband for her."
"You will hardly get her."
"Not get her?"
"Not without her mother's consent. The lass cares for naught but her."
"Pish! that sorceress? Send for the girl."
Abbot Ulfketyl, forced in his own abbey, great and august lord though he
was, to obey any upstart of a Norman priest who came backed by the King
and Lanfranc, sent for the lass.
The young outlaw came in,--hawk on fist, and its hood off, for it was a
pet,--short, sturdy, upright, brown-haired, blue-eyed, ill-dressed, with
hard hands and sun-burnt face, but with the hawk-eye of her father and her
mother, and the hawks among which she was bred.
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