before me as thy natural prize, I dare not, or I will not say. When
time sets that prize within reach of thy spear's point, say then, 'I
am not ambitious!' Ponder and decide."

And Harold pondered long, and decided not as Godwin could have wished.
For he had not the seventy years of his father, and the prize lay yet
in the womb of the mountains; though the dwarf and the gnome were
already fashioning the ore to the shape of a crown.




CHAPTER VI.


While Harold mused over his father's words, Edith, seated on a low
stool beside the Lady of England, listened with earnest but mournful
reverence to her royal namesake.

The Queen's [113] closet opened like the King's on one hand to an
oratory, on the other to a spacious ante-room; the lower part of the
walls was covered with arras, leaving space for a niche that contained
an image of the Virgin. Near the doorway to the oratory, was the
stoupe or aspersorium for holy-water; and in various cysts and crypts,
in either room, were caskets containing the relics of saints. The
purple light from the stained glass of a high narrow window, shaped in
the Saxon arch, streamed rich and full over the Queen's bended head
like a glory, and tinged her pale cheek, as with a maiden blush; and
she might have furnished a sweet model for early artist, in his dreams
of St. Mary the Mother, not when, young and blest, she held the divine