utrage and
slaughter and fell in with them, taking up their song. The first line
passed; and Eldris saw the reason of their triumph. For those in the
rear dragged with them a prisoner, a small man, battered and bloody,
with one arm hanging in a torn sling. She could not see his face, but
her heart turned to water within her. The song sickened her with an
overpowering sense of her own weakness against all that it signified of
brutal male strength; it dominated her, and before it she shrank and
shivered. But now her terror was not all for herself alone, but for that
one who might be also in their hands, prisoner to them even as was this
poor puppet prisoner. She started up, with a cry which was drowned in
the rhythm of the terrible song as ever the cries of women have been
drowned in the song of the fighting, and fell back in a huddle against
the wall, with her face hidden on her knees, sobbing:

"Christ--oh, Christ, save him! Mary, save him, or let me die with him!"

When she found her way back to life, Thorney was wrapped in silence and
illimitable gloom. The light of the burning houses had died; the shouts
of men and shrieks of women and the fierce song of the Saxons had
ceased. Yet there were other sounds which grew out of the darkness as
she listened; a thin far wailing, like the ghost of grief, and close at
hand a man's deep voice, very low, broken by sobbing.

"Soul of my heart, where art thou! All the night I have searched and
cannot find thee, dead nor living. The curse of all evil be upon these
Saxon swine! They have slain her--my woman!--and she is dead! No more
will she lie beside me when the dark swims in the hut.--O light of my
life, could I but hear thee call me once again thy great ugly bear! Eh,
thy bear is a sad bear this night, my lamb!"

Eldris stumbled to her feet, covering her ears with her hands. She also
was seeking and could not find. She started running from the dreadful
sobbing voice, picking her way as best she might in the wreck and ruin
of the Saxons' trail.

Long she searched, and everywhere met others, also seeking, and yet
others who had found what they had lost. Torches flashed in and out like
fireflies among the darkened lanes; from houses left unscathed came the
wailing of women who had brought home their dead. The air was heavy with
smoke, so that the eyes smarted and the throat stung.

Into the face of every man who passed her she looked with eager eyes of
hope. Every man's body