he had taken
everything away, but I could not tell her so. And the days passed, and I
hoped that Cnut would come straight back; but he did not. It grieved me,
for I loved him, and hoped that he would return, and that in time she
would forget Lord Harold, and not be strange, but be as she had been to
Cnut before he came. Yet I thought it not wholly wonderful that Cnut did
not return at once, nor unwise; for she was lonely, and would sit all
day looking up the mountain, and when he came she would, I thought, be
glad to have him back.

"At the end of a week she began to urge me to go for a letter. But I
told her it could not come so soon; but when another week had passed she
began to sew, and when I asked her what she sewed, she said her bridal
dress, and she became so that I agreed to go, for I knew no letter would
come, and it broke my heart to see her. And when I was ready she
kissed me, and wept in my arms, and called me her good father; and so I
started.

"She stood in the door and watched me climb the mountain, and waved to
me almost gayly.

"The snow was deep, but I followed the track which Cnut and the
Englishman had made two weeks before, for no new snow had fallen, and I
saw that one track was ever behind the other, and never beside it, as if
Cnut had fallen back and followed behind him.

"And so I came near to the Devil's Seat, where it was difficult, and from
where Cnut had brought him in his arms that day, and then, for the first
time, I began to fear, for I remembered Cnut's look as he came from the
house when she waved him off, and it had been so easy for him with a
swing of his strong arm to have pushed the other over the cliff. But
when I saw that he had driven his stick in deep to hold hard, and that
the tracks went on beyond, I breathed freely again, and so I passed the
narrow path, and the black wall, and came to the Devil's Seat; and as I
turned the rock my heart stopped beating, and I had nearly fallen from
the ledge. For there, scattered and half-buried in the snow, lay the
pack Cnut had carried on his back, and the snow was all dug up and piled
about as if stags had been fighting there for their lives. From the
wall, across and back, were deep furrows, as if they were ploughed by
men's feet dug fiercely in; but they were ever deeper toward the edge,
and on one spot at the edge the snow was all torn clear from the black
rock, and beyond the seat the narrow path lay smooth, and bright, and
level