England waved over thy couch." [106]

"But how long shall the exile be?" asked Githa, comforted. Harold's
brow fell.

"Mother, not even to cheer thee will I deceive. The time of the
hostageship rests with the King and the Duke. As long as the one
affects fear from the race of Godwin, as long as the other feigns care
for such priests or such knights as were not banished from the realm,
being not courtiers, but scattered wide and far in convent and
homestead, so long will Wolnoth and Haco be guests in the Norman
halls."

Githa wrung her hands.

"But comfort, my mother; Wolnoth is young, his eye is keen, and his
spirit prompt and quick. He will mark these Norman captains, he will
learn their strength and their weakness, their manner of war, and he
will come back, not as Edward the King came, a lover of things un-
Saxon, but able to warn and to guide us against the plots of the camp-
court, which threatens more, year by year, the peace of the world.
And he will see there arts we may worthily borrow: not the cut of a
tunic, and the fold of a gonna, but the arts of men who found states
and build nations. William the Duke is splendid and wise; merchants
tell us how crafts thrive under his iron hand, and war-men say that
his forts are constructed with skill and his battle-schemes planned as
the mason plans key-stone and arch, with weight portioned out to the
prop, and the force of the hand made tenfold by the science of the
brain. So that the boy will return to us a man round and complete, a
teacher of greybeards, and the sage of his kin; fit for earldom and