Edith grew very pale, and her tone trembled as she answered:

"Well-a-day, yes."

"It is as I feared, then!" exclaimed Harold, in great agitation; "and
my sister, whom these monks have demented, leagues herself with the
King against the law of the wide welkin and the grand religion of the
human heart. Oh!" continued the Earl, kindling into an enthusiasm,
rare to his even moods, but wrung as much from his broad sense as from
his strong affection, "when I compare the Saxon of our land and day,
all enervated and decrepit by priestly superstition, with his
forefathers in the first Christian era, yielding to the religion they
adopted in its simple truths, but not to that rot of social happiness
and free manhood which this cold and lifeless monarchism--making
virtue the absence of human ties--spreads around--which the great Bede
[110], though himself a monk, vainly but bitterly denounced;--yea,
verily, when I see the Saxon already the theowe of the priest, I
shudder to ask how long he will be folk-free of the tyrant."

He paused, breathed hard, and seizing, almost sternly, the girl's
trembling arm, he resumed between his set teeth: "So they would have
thee be a nun?--Thou wilt not,--thou durst not,--thy heart would
perjure thy vows!"

"Ah, Harold!" answered Edith, moved out of all bashfulness by his
emotion and her own terror of the convent, and answering, if with the
love of a woman, still with all the unconsciousness of a child:
"Better, oh better the grate of the body than that of the heart!--In
the grave I could still live for those I love; behind the Grate, love