His manner was less smoothly deferential than when addressing
Edmund, she noticed, affecting more the air of bluff frankness which one might
who wished to disarm any suspicion of flattering; but she could not hear what
he said because of the noise around him. The first words she heard distinctly
were Canute's, as he paused with upraised goblet to look at the Mercian. Like
an arrow his voice cleft the uproar, so that here and there men checked the
speech on their lips to look at him, and their neighbors, observing them,
paused also, until the lull extended from corner to corner.
"Strangely do you ask," he said. "Why should I give you more than Edmund gave
you?"
She had no difficulty in hearing Edric this time. Aggressively honest, his
words rang out with startling sharpness: "Because it was for you that I went
against Edmund, and from faithfulness to you that I afterwards destroyed him."
Out of the stillness that followed, a voice cried, "Are you mad?" and there
was the grating of chairs thrust hastily back. But, after a great wrench, her
heart stood still within her as through the madness she perceived the purpose.
As well as Edric of Mercia she knew that the young Viking's vulnerable point
was his longing for his own self-esteem, a craving so unreckoning in its
fervor that--should he have the guilty consciousness the traitor counted on--
rather than endure his own reproach for cowardice he would be equal to the
wild brazenness of flinging the avowal in the teeth of his assembled court.
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