sweet Provencal wife wanted anything, he contrived that she should have
it.

Eleanor could not help seeing, however, that her mother was careful not to
appear discontented or melancholy, and to do all that a daughter could do
for her husband's stern old mother. Both Sir Stephen Giffard and Sir
Walter, Eleanor's father, were away most of the time, and if Lady Philippa
had been disposed to make herself unhappy she might have been exceedingly
miserable. The old chatelaine did not approve of luxury, even such small
luxuries as were almost necessities in that vast pile of stone which was
the inheritance of the Norman Giffards. The castle hall was as grim and
bare as a guard-room except on state occasions, and the food was hardly
better on the master's table than below the salt, where the common folk
ate. To be sure, there was plenty to eat, such as it was. The old lord,
who had been dead for many years now, had married the daughter of a Saxon
earl when he was a young knight in England, and Lady Ebba had been used to
plentiful provision in the house of her father. In the autumn, when the
other castles in the neighborhood sent forth gay hunting parties, and the
deep forest, whose trees had never known the ax since Caesar built his
bridges in Gaul, rang to the hunting horns, there was no such merrymaking
on the Giffard lands. Instead, the folk were salting down beef and fish
and pork--particularly pork, from the herds of swine that roamed the woods
feeding on the acorns and beech mast. Toward the end of the winter there
seemed to be more pork than anything else on the table.

Lady Philippa had ruled her father's house when she was a girl of
fourteen, and she could have taught the people a different way of living.
She knew how to raise and care for the great variety of poultry, water-
fowl, pigeons, hares, fish, and delicate small birds of many kinds, such
as some of their neighbors had and the southern provinces of France