A hard blow to their pride was that, but their revenge was not long in coming.
"It chanced they had a cousin--a maid as sweet and fair and pure as they were hideous and foul.

We met in the meads--she and I.Spring was the time--God! It seems but yesterday!--and each in our bearing towards the other forgot the traditions of the names we bore.

And as at first we had met by chance, so did we meet later by contrivance, not once or twice, but many times.

God, how sweet she was! How sweet was all the world! How sweet it was to live and to be young! We loved.

How else could it have been?
What to us were traditions, what to us the hatred that for centuries had held our families asunder?
In us it lay to set aside all that.
"And so I sought my father.