a sigh followed Godwin into one of the contiguous chambers.

"Harold," then said Earl Godwin, after closing the door carefully,
"thou must not let the King keep thee longer in dalliance and
idleness: thine earldom needs thee without delay. Thou knowest that
these East Angles, as we Saxons still call them, are in truth mostly
Danes and Norsemen; people jealous and fierce, and free, and more akin
to the Normans than to the Saxons. My whole power in England hath
been founded, not less on my common birth with the freefolk of Wessex
--Saxons like myself, and therefore easy for me, a Saxon, to conciliate
and control--than on the hold I have ever sought to establish, whether
by arms or by arts, over the Danes in the realm. And I tell and I
warn thee, Harold, as the natural heir of my greatness, that he who
cannot command the stout hearts of the Anglo-Danes, will never
maintain the race of Godwin in the post they have won in the vanguard
of Saxon England."

"This I wot well, my father," answered Harold; "and I see with joy,
that while those descendants of heroes and freemen are blended
indissolubly with the meeker Saxon, their freer laws and hardier
manners are gradually supplanting, or rather regenerating, our own."

Godwin smiled approvingly on his son, and then his brow becoming
serious, and the dark pupil of his blue eye dilating, he resumed:

"This is well, my son; and hast thou thought also, that while thou art
loitering in these galleries, amidst the ghosts of men in monk cowls,
Siward is shadowing our House with his glory, and all north the Humber
rings with his name? Hast thou thought that all Mercia is in the
hands of Leofric our rival, and that Algar his son, who ruled Wessex