“I would not leave you, my King,” I said at last.

Ina looked up at me with a smile, but was silent, stroking his beard as was his way when thinking, looking past me out of the narrow window to the great Tor that towered beyond the new abbey buildings.

“Think!” he said at last—­“partings must come, and lands are not to be had lightly.  Erpwald’s brother, who held Eastdean, is dead.”

“I need no lands,” I answered.  “The ways of a captain of your house-carles are good to me, and I need no more.  If I took those lands from your hand, my King, needs must that I gave up all the life with you.  Sooner would I let the land go and bide with you.  Yet if I must needs take them, be it as you will.”

“It is a great thing that you speak so lightly of giving up,” he answered gravely; “Erpwald, the heathen, was willing to risk his life for those lands, and he held them dear.  And a captain of the king’s house-carles will always look to be rewarded for service with lands.  In time you will seek the same.”

“That time has not yet come to me, King Ina.”

“Eastdean lies in my hand here,” he said, taking up a parchment with a great seal on it.  “I may give it to whom I will, but you are the lawful heir who should hold it from me.  If it goes not to you, it may be that one whom you would not shall have it.”

Then I said, not seeing at all what the king would have me do, but thinking that he deemed me foolish for not taking the lands straightway: 

“Let me bide with you even yet for a while.  When the time comes that I must leave you I must go to Owen, and neither he nor I care for aught but to be here.  He must leave you because of duty, and if this is indeed choice with me, let me choose to stay.  It is nought to me who holds the lands, save only that it might be one who will tend the grave of my father.”

Then said Ina, looking into my face and smiling, as if well pleased: 

“The choice is free, my Thane, and I should be wrong if I did not say that I am glad to hear you choose thus.  I have missed you in these days, and I have work here for you yet.  It was in my mind that thus you would choose, and I am glad.  Let it be so.  I need one to take the place of Owen, as second in command of the household, as one may say, and that you must do for me henceforward.

“Nay,” he said quickly, raising his hand as I tried to find some words of thanks for this honour; “you know the ways of Owen, and men know you, and it will be as if there had been no change, and that will mean that we shall have no grumbling in the palace, and the right men will be sent to do what they are best fitted for—­and all that, so that there will be quiet about the court as ever.  It is a matter off my mind, let me tell you, and no thanks are needed.”

So he laughed and let me kiss his hand, patting me on the shoulder as I rose, and then bade me sit down again.  He had yet more to say.