William Fitzosborne) had spoken thus to me--"

"Thou wouldst have done as I, my brother," interrupted Edward; "prayed
to our Lord to pardon her, and rode on pitying."

William's lip quivered with ire, yet he curbed the reply that sprang
to it, and he looked with affection genuinely more akin to admiration
than scorn, upon his fellow-prince. For, fierce and relentless as the
Duke's deeds were, his faith was notably sincere; and while this made,
indeed, the prince's chief attraction to the pious Edward, so, on the
other hand, this bowed the Duke in a kind of involuntary and
superstitious homage to the man who sought to square deeds to faith.
It is ever the case with stern and stormy spirits, that the meek ones
which contrast them steal strangely into their affections. This
principle of human nature can alone account for the enthusiastic
devotion which the mild sufferings of the Saviour awoke in the
fiercest exterminators of the North. In proportion, often, to the
warrior's ferocity, was his love to that Divine model, at whose
sufferings he wept, to whose tomb he wandered barefoot, and whose
example of compassionate forgiveness he would have thought himself the
basest of men to follow!

"Now, by my halidame, I honour and love thee, Edward," cried the Duke,
with a heartiness more frank than was usual to him: "and were I thy
subject, woe to man or woman that wagged tongue to wound thee by a
breath. But who and what is this same Hilda? one of thy kith and
kin?--surely not less than kingly blood runs so bold?"

"William, bien aime," [15] said the King, "it is true that Hilda, whom
the saints assoil, is of kingly blood, though not of our kingly line.