is breast heaved.

"Leave us, Edith," said Hilda, in a low voice; and after watching her
grandchild's slow reluctant steps descend the knoll, she turned to
Harold, and leading him towards the gravestone of the Saxon chief, said:

"Rememberest thou the spectre that rose from this mound?--rememberest
thou the dream that followed it?"

"The spectre, or deceit of mine eye, I remember well," answered the Earl;
"the dream, not;--or only in confused and jarring fragments."

"I told thee then, that I could not unriddle the dream by the light of
the moment; and that the dead who slept below never appeared to men, save
for some portent of doom to the house of Cerdic. The portent is
fulfilled; the Heir of Cerdic is no more. To whom appeared the great
Scin-laeca, but to him who shall lead a new race of kings to the Saxon
throne!"

Harold breathed hard, and the colour mounted bright and glowing to his
cheek and brow.

"I cannot gainsay thee, Vala. Unless, despite all conjecture, Edward
should be spared to earth till the Atheling's infant son acquires the age
when bearded men will acknowledge a chief [151], I look round in England
for the coming king, and all England reflects but mine own image."

His head rose erect as he spoke, and already the brow seemed august, as
if circled by the diadem of the Basileus. "And if it be so," he added,
"I accept that solemn trust, and England shall grow greater in my
greatness."

"The flame breaks at last from the smouldering fuel!" cried the Vala,
"and the hour I so long foretold to thee hath come!"

Harold answered not, for high and kindling emotions deafened him to all
but the voice of a grand ambition, and the awakening joy of a noble
heart.

"And then--and then," he exclaimed, "I shall need no mediator between
nature and monkcraft;--then, O Edith, the life thou hast saved will
indeed be thine!" He paused, and it was a sign of the change that an
ambition long repressed, but now rushing into the vent legitimately open
to it, had already begun to work in the character hitherto so
self-reliant, when he said in a low voice, "But that dream which hath so
long lain locked, not lost, in my mind; that dream of which I recall only
vague remembrances of danger yet defiance, trouble yet triumph,--canst
thou unriddle it, O Vala, into auguries of success?"

"Harold," answered Hilda, "thou didst hear at the close of thy dream, the
music of the hymns that are chaunted at the crowning of a ki