She recalled a brief space of something like sleep-walking as the soldiers led
her through branching corridors to this room, and fetched for her attendant
the only woman available, a wench they had taken from trencher-washing in the
royal kitchen. She remembered irritably rejecting the woman's clumsy services
and sending her to sleep on her pallet, while she herself walked to and fro
with her surging thoughts until sheer physical exhaustion forced her to throw
herself upon the bed. After that she remembered--nothing.
"I am glad that I did not disgrace my kin by screaming or fainting," she
reflected now, as she raised herself stiffly. "I am glad I did that much
credit to my name." She flushed as her hand, touching the pillow, found it
wet, and for an instant the bearing of her head was less erect. "I do not
remember what I dreamed," she murmured, "but full well I know that it was not
because Norman Leofwinesson is slain that I shed tears in my sleep." For a
while she drooped there, her eyes on the open window, outside of which a robin
was singing blithely among the cherries. But all at once she seized the pillow
with a kind of fierceness, and turned it over and piled the others on top of
it, crying under her breath, "How dared he! How dared he! I will shed no tears
for him while I am awake. I will remember only that I am my father's daughter
and the Lady of Avalcomb.
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