After a time, Cuthbert called Cnut to him, and the two talked long and earnestly.  Cnut returned to his comrades with a face less despairing than that he had before worn, and sent off at once a messenger with all speed to a franklin near the forest to borrow a stout rope some fifty feet in length, and without telling his comrades what the plans of Sir Cuthbert were, bade them cheer up, for that desperate as the position was, all hope was not yet lost.

“Sir Cuthbert,” he said, “has been in grievous straits before now, and has gone through them.  Sir Rudolph does not know the nature of the man with whom he has to deal, and we may trick him yet.”

At eleven o’clock the next day, from the walls of Evesham Castle a body of archers 150 strong were seen advancing in solid array.

“Think you, Sir Rudolph,” one of his friends, Sir Hubert of Gloucester, said to him, “that these varlets think of attacking the castle?”

“They might as well think of scaling heaven,” Sir Rudolph said.  “Evesham could resist a month’s siege by a force well equipped for the purpose; and were it not that good men are wanted for the king’s service, and that these villains shoot straight and hard, I would open the gates of the castle and launch our force against them.  We are two to one as strong as they, and our knights and mounted men-at-arms could alone scatter that rabble.”

Conspicuous upon the battlements a gallows had been erected.

The archers stopped at a distance of a few hundred yards from the castle, and Sir Cuthbert advanced alone to the edge of the moat.

“Sir Rudolph of Eresby, false knight and perjured gentleman,” he shouted in a loud voice, “I, Sir Cuthbert of Evesham, do denounce you as foresworn and dishonoured, and do challenge you to meet me here before the castle in sight of your men and mine, and decide our quarrel as heaven may judge with sword and battle-axe.”

Sir Rudolph leant over the battlements, and said,—­

“It is too late, varlet.  I condescended to challenge you before, and you refused.  You cannot now claim what you then feared to accept.  The sun on the dial approaches noon, and unless you surrender yourself before it reaches the mark, I will keep my word, and the traitress, your mother, shall swing from that beam.”

Making a sign to two men-at-arms, these brought forward Dame Editha and so placed her on the battlements that she could be seen from below.  Dame Editha was still a very fair woman, although nigh forty years had rolled over her head.  No sign of fear appeared upon her face, and in a firm voice she cried to her son,—­

“Cuthbert, I beg—­nay, I order you to retire.  If this unknightly lord venture to carry out his foul threats against me, let him do so.  England will ring with the dastardly deed, and he will never dare show his face again where Englishmen congregate.  Let him do his worst.  I am prepared to die.”