Éowyn is quiet a moment, taking the cup in both her hands but not drinking. She considers her bride afresh: lithely easy, in her mannish clothes, with sword-belt and hair cut short, speaking of lovers in May as though such things were the free preserve of a noble maid. Speaking so often of merriment, and so little of duty. There, again, is that old pang of jealousy, that sense of a life she might have had, in some other world. There is a kind of mockery for a woman who has found herself so often a prisoner of her sex to be married to a woman who cares for its strictures not at all.

"You are a strange woman," she says at last, with more admiration than distaste, and smiles for the first time all day. "And still merrier than songs would promise, in marriage or in love."

The songs she favours, at least; but then, she has never sung the merriest songs.