with innumerable branchlets, or were centred on
some solitary distorted limb which the woodman's axe had spared. The
trees thus assumed all manner of crooked, deformed, fantastic shapes--all
betokening age, and all decay--all, in despite of the noiseless solitude
around, proclaiming the waste and ravages of man.

The time was that of the first watches of night, when the autumnal moon
was brightest and broadest. You might see, on the opposite side of the
pool, the antlers of the deer every now and then, moving restlessly above
the fern in which they had made their couch; and, through the nearer
glades, the hares and conies stealing forth to sport or to feed; or the
bat wheeling low, in chase of the forest moth. From the thickest part of
the copse came a slow human foot, and Hilda, emerging, paused by the
waters of the pool. That serene and stony calm habitual to her features
was gone; sorrow and passion had seized the soul of the Vala, in the
midst of its fancied security from the troubles it presumed to foresee
for others. The lines of the face were deep and care-worn--age had come
on with rapid strides--and the light of the eye was vague and unsettled,
as if the lofty reason shook, terrified in its pride, at last.

"Alone, alone!" she murmured, half aloud: "yea, evermore alone! And the
grandchild I had reared to be the mother of kings--whose fate, from the
cradle, seemed linked with royalty and love--in whom, watching and hoping
for, in whom, loving and heeding, methought I lived again the sweet human
life--hath gone from my hearth--forsaken, broken-hearted--withering down
to the grave under the shade of the barren cloister! Is mine heart,
then, all a lie? Are the gods who led Odin from the Scythian East but
the juggling fiends whom the craven Christian abhors? Lo! the Wine Month
has come; a few nights more, and the sun which all prophecy foretold
should go down on the union of the icing and the maid, shall bring round
the appointed day: yet Aldyth still lives, and Edith still withers; and
War stands side by side with the Church, between the betrothed and the
altar. Verily, verily, my spirit hath lost its power, and leaves me
bowed, in the awe of night, a feeble, aged, hopeless, childless woman!"

Tears of human weakness rolled down the Vala's cheeks. At that moment, a
laugh came from a thing that had seemed like the fallen trunk of a tree,
or a trough in which the herdsman waters his cattle, so still, and