A kind of laugh--for laugh absolute it was not--rattled under the cowl
of the tall stranger, as he drew it still closer over his face, with a
hand that might have spanned the breast of his interrogator, and he
made a gesture as if he did not understand the question addressed to
him.

Therewith the Norman knight, bending with demure courtesy across the
board to Godrith the Saxon, said:

"Pardex [55], but this fair guest and seigneur seemeth to me, noble
Godree (whose name I fear my lips do but rudely enounce) of Saxon line
and language; our Romance tongue he knoweth not. Pray you, is it the
Saxon custom to enter a king's hall so garbed, and drink a knight's
wine so mutely?"

Godrith, a young Saxon of considerable rank, but one of the most
sedulous of the imitators of the foreign fashions, coloured high at
the irony in the knight's speech, and turning rudely to the huge
guest, who was now causing immense fragments of pasty to vanish under
the cavernous cowl, he said in his native tongue, though with a lisp
as if unfamiliar to him--

"If thou beest Saxon, shame us not with thy ceorlish manners; crave
pardon of this Norman thegn, who will doubtless yield it to thee in
pity. Uncover thy face--and--"

Here the Saxon's rebuke was interrupted; for one of the servitors just
then approaching Godrith's side with a spit, elegantly caparisoned
with some score of plump larks, the unmannerly giant stretched out his
arm within an inch of the Saxon's startled nose, and possessed himself