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had never been misplaced.
    Some said too that Lord Radnor—reported invincible in war—was not Gaunt's son but the child of the devil whom Gaunt had received because he could father no heir. Certainly twenty years of marriage to a second wife had produced no other child. Leah shuddered briefly because she knew that such things were possible. He said he was crippled, but was he? Or was the foot he limped on the horn hoof that marked Satan in his human form? Leah pulled the borrowed cloak closer about her, chilled by fear more than by the April wind.
    It was useless to dwell upon such fears. This man, whatever he was, would be her husband. Her father had so commanded, and so it must be. Only what would she do if …  Whatever else was uncertain, there could be no doubt that Lord Radnor was a great knight, and that she would be a great lady, the equal of any in the land save the queen alone. He would not have wanted to marry her if he planned to do her harm. If she were very obedient, Leah thought, she might be able to please him. With her father obedience did not always serve, but Lord Radnor was much younger than her father. Perhaps he would be kind to her—he had said he wished to use her kindly—or at least not unkind. If that were true, how proud she would be in the ranks of ladies with such a lord.
     
    After Leah had left, Lord Radnor drew a shaken breath and swallowed hard several times. "Madness," he said to the fire. "It comes from reading those accursed romantic tales."
    Then the sound of his own voice embarrassed him, and he scowled at the blameless flames. For twelve years Lord Radnor had spent few days without a sword in his hand and few nights in a safe bed. He had fought up and down the borders of his father's huge holdings keeping out robber barons and forcing the Welsh, who always desired to throw off the yoke of the Norman conquerors, to continue to serve them and pay taxes. Before that time, however, he had been taught by the priests his father supported, for Gaunt had not only peculiar ideas about serfs but equally peculiar ones about the value of education. The earl felt that if a man could read and write he could never be at the mercy of the clerical scribes; if he could speak and understand all the languages used by the people around him, including Welsh and Latin, he could understand things it might be dangerous to miss and would never need a translator.
    In the mass of tutors needed for such an education, one man, Father Thomas, had recognized the qualities of the irritable, high-strung lad who was such a good student and such a difficult pupil. Father Thomas was not, perhaps, a very good priest, but he was a perceptive, gentle man. For a little while he had tried to foster the streak of gentleness he recognized in Cain with talk of the love of God and the beauty of faith. To this there had been no response; the fear that he was born damned as well as crippled was already too strongly implanted in the child.
    When Father Thomas understood that fear, he promptly abandoned all attempts to save his pupil's soul and saved his reason instead. He had introduced Lord Radnor to the Latin classics available, particularly Virgil's Aeneid ,and to the "romance." In these popular tales, knights lived by their honor; they were gentle to all women and loved only one throughout life; they fought for the oppressed and for the right without thought of self. Lord Radnor knew this was not life as it was, but it was a dream to cling to and an escape for his tormented mind. Through all the years of war and brutality and blood and death, he had clung to his dream, yearning for something beyond sordid reality and for a proof, in his endeavor to imitate the heroes of those tales, that he was a good man.
    The Earl of Gaunt, a hard and brutal person, but shrewd and long-sighted beyond most men of his times, had added reality, all unwitting, to his son's dream. He had seen that serfs who had sufficient to eat and who were not