d the driving of wooden pins and hewing of
doorways.

All this time we lived at the hall of Lord Uffe, except some of us who
stayed in the houses round.

I lived at the hall. Thus I saw from the beginning, the trouble that
came to us, and that brought storm and madness. Here, lost from all men,
with the unknown sea between us and all things but the birds and woods
and trees and waters and our little selves, was played a thing that was
unchanged from the far places we had left, as though we had never left
them.

While the fields grew greener, and the birds sang, and our house was
growing nearer finishing, while Lord Uffe walked in the forest and our
ship lay on the beach and our men ate in the hall, my lord, with his
yellow hair, and his soft harping, made love to the daughter of Lord
Uffe's dead brother, the betrothed of the friend of Lord Uffe, the
great man who had sat in the hall silently when we found welcome there.

It was this way. One day, when the noon held all the fields in stillness
and the little singing things were silent in the grass, I walked--for the
day was too warm to work in the mid-day--slowly, along one of the forest
paths, just shut off from the glare of the sun in the open by a screen
of trees whose leaves hung still in the silence. Then, far before me, I
saw at the end of the path two figures, and stopped, I do not know why.
I saw who the figures were--my own lord and Hilda, the betrothed of his
friend.

They were coming toward me, but their heads were bent down, and they did
not yet see me. I waited; though they walked slowly it seemed but a
moment till they were close to me; they were walking in silence. I know
not why, but I turned softly and went back, they not seeing me. As I
went back the silence oppressed me and I wanted the sound of the
crickets in the grass.

When I came into the hall that night for my meat, and looked up at the
end of the table where she sat by the great man, I sat down in the
shadow and was ashamed, for I saw it all.

Perhaps it was that we were new and strange, or perhaps it was my lord's
harping, and songs, and gentle ways, that took the maiden's liking--she
to whom the world was a legend. The people about her were rough; she, in
her simple dress, had learnt from the delicate flowers and things of the
woods where she had lived, to find them so perhaps. But when I looked up
from the shadow and caught the gleam of my lord's eyes as they met hers,
looking across