my
pipe afresh and just looked at him. He received it as an answer.

"She is the last of them," he said, accepting me as an auditor rather
than addressing me. "We go back to Olaf Traetelje, the blood of Harold
Haarfager (the Fairhaired) is in our veins, and here it ends. Dane and
Swede have known our power, Saxon and Celt have bowed bare-headed to
us, and with her it ends. In this stronghold many times her fathers have
found refuge from their foes and gained breathing-time after battles
by sea and land. From this nest, like eagles, they have swooped down,
carrying all before them, and here, at last, when betrayed and hunted,
they found refuge. Here no foreign king could rule over them; here they
learnt the lesson that Christ is the only king, and that all men are his
brothers. Here they lived and worshipped him. If their dominions were
stolen from them they found here a truer wealth, content; if they had
not power, they had what was better, independence. For centuries they
held this last remnant of the dominion which Harold Haarfager had
conquered by land, and Eric of the Bloody Axe had won by sea, sending
out their sons and daughters to people the lands; but the race dwindled
as their lands had done before, and now with her dies the last. How has
it come? As ever, by betrayal!"

The old man turned fiercely, his breast heaving, his eyes burning.

"Was she who came of a race at whose feet jarls have crawled and
kings have knelt not good enough?" I was hearing the story and did
not interrupt him--"Not good enough for him!" he continued in his
low, fierce monotone. "I did not want him. What if he was a Saxon? His
fathers were our boatmen. Rather Cnut a thousand times. Then the race
would not have died. Then she would not be--not be so."

The reference to her recalled him to himself, and he suddenly relapsed
into silence.

"At least, Cnut paid the score," he began once more, in a low intense
undertone. "In his arms he bore him down from the Devil's Seat, a
thousand feet sheer on the hard ice, where his cursed body lies crushed
forever, a witness of his falsehood."

I did not interrupt, and he rewarded my patience, giving a more
connected account, for the first time addressing me directly.

"Her mother died when she was a child," he said, softly. His gentle
voice contrasted strangely with the fierce undertone in which he had
been speaking. "I was mother as well as father to her. She was as good
as she was beautiful,