te in the night ere I reach home; but Sexwolf already hath my orders.
At sunrise we return to London, and thence we march on the insurgents."

"All shall be ready. Farewell, noble Edith; and thou, Thyra my cousin,
one kiss more to our meeting again." The child fondly held out her arms
to him, and as she kissed his cheek whispered:

"In the grave, Haco!"

The young man drew his mantle around him, and moved away. But he did not
mount his steed, which still grazed by the road; while Harold's, more
familiar with the place, had found its way to the stall; nor did he take
his path through the glades to the house of his kinsman. Entering the
Druid temple, he stood musing by the Teuton tomb. The night grew deeper
and deeper, the stars more luminous and the air more hushed, when a voice
close at his side, said, clear and abrupt:

"What does Youth the restless, by Death the still?"

It was the peculiarity of Haco, that nothing ever seemed to startle or
surprise him. In that brooding boyhood, the solemn, quiet, and sad
experience all fore-armed, of age, had something in it terrible and
preternatural; so without lifting his eyes from the stone, he answered:

"How sayest thou, O Hilda, that the dead are still?" Hilda placed her
hand on his shoulder, and stooped to look into his face.

"Thy rebuke is just, son of Sweyn. In Time, and in the Universe, there
is no stillness! Through all eternity the state impossible to the soul
is repose!--So again thou art in thy native land?"

"And for what end, Prophetess? I remember, when but an infant, who till
then had enjoyed the common air and the daily sun, thou didst rob me
evermore of childhood and youth. For thou didst say to my father, that
'dark was the woof of my fate, and that its most glorious hour should be
its last!'"

"But thou wert surely too childlike, (see thee now as thou wert then,
stretched on the grass, and playing with thy father's falcon!)--too
childlike to heed my words."

"Does the new ground reject the germs of the sower, or the young heart
the first lessons of wonder and awe? Since then, Prophetess, Night hath
been my comrade, and Death my familiar. Rememberest thou again the hour
when, stealing, a boy, from Harold's house in his absence--the night ere
I left my land--I stood on this mound by thy side? Then did I tell thee
that the sole soft thought that relieved the bitterness of my soul, when
all the rest of my kinsfolk seemed to behold in me but