him."

The woman spoke with a rapidity and vehemence which seemed to have in
it a touch of insanity; and a sudden sense of the danger to which the
child must necessarily be exposed in the charge of such a keeper,
increased the Lady's desire to keep him in the castle if possible.

"You mistake me, dame," she said, addressing the old woman in a
soothing manner; "I do not wish your boy to be in attendance on
myself, but upon the good knight my husband. Were he himself the son
of a belted earl, he could not better be trained to arms, and all that
befits a gentleman, than by the instructions and discipline of Sir
Halbert Glendinning."

"Ay," answered the old woman, in the same style of bitter irony, "I
know the wages of that service;--a curse when the corslet is not
sufficiently brightened,--a blow when the girth is not tightly
drawn,--to be beaten because the hounds are at fault,--to be reviled
because the foray is unsuccessful,--to stain his hands for the
master's bidding in the blood alike of beast and of man,--to be a
butcher of harmless deer, a murderer and defacer of God's own image,
not at his own pleasure, but at that of his lord,--to live a brawling
ruffian, and a common stabber--exposed to heat, to cold, to want of
food, to all the privations of an anchoret, not for the love of God,
but for the service of Satan,--to die by the gibbet, or in some
obscure skirmish,--to sleep out his brief life in carnal security, and
to awake in the eternal fire, which is never quenched."

"Nay," said the Lady of Avenel, "but to such unhallowed course of life
your grandson will not be here exposed. My husband is just and kind to