Of course she would come with a great train, and the trouble and expense
would be great. But the hospitality of those days, when money was scarce,
and wine scarcer still, was unbounded, and a matter of course; and
Alftruda was overjoyed. No doubt, Judith was the most unpopular person in
England at that moment; called by all a traitress and a fiend. But she was
an old acquaintance of Alftruda's; she was the king's niece; she was
immensely rich, not only in manors of her own, but in manors, as
Domesday-book testifies, about Lincolnshire and the counties round, which
had belonged to her murdered husband,--which she had too probably received
as the price of her treason. So Alftruda looked to her visit as to an
honor which would enable her to hold her head high among the proud Norman
dames, who despised her as the wife of an Englishman.
Hereward looked on the visit in a different light. He called Judith ugly
names, not undeserved; and vowed that if she entered his house by the
front door he would go out at the back. "Torfrida prophesied," he said,
"that she would betray her husband, and she had done it."
"Torfrida prophesied? Did she prophesy that I should betray you likewise?"
asked Alftruda, in a tone of bitter scorn.
"No, you handsome fiend: will you do it?"
"Yes; I am a handsome fiend, am I not?" and she bridled up her magnificent
beauty, and stood over him as a snake stands over a mouse.
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