should do with
my lands and cattle when the soft weather and spring-time came at last.
Sighing and putting these thoughts away from me as something too far off
to be yet of use, I rose and through the darkened hall passed through
the tapestried doorway and up the dimly-lighted stair, where the candles
were distant, to my wife's room, before which hung a curtain that I had
bought her in the Port of Swenborg from a ship that had come from the
east countries, and as I raised the curtain in my hand, seeing by the
faint light of one candle high on the wall behind me the great oak
panels of her familiar door, I stopped. I stood still, the curtain in my
hand, and the light flickered over the saints' heads carved on the oaken
panels, and over my head. At the arch of the doorway stood an oak figure
of a saint only the projecting edges of whose robe and face could be
seen in the candle-light. I stood there while the candle blew and
flamed; I heard its dripping on the floor; I glanced once toward the
staircase, where the descending uncertain lights led down into the dusk
and darkness. Somewhere in the distance outside the hall I heard a man
singing in a coarse voice, then his comrades joined in the chorus, and I
heard their "skaals." I stood there holding the curtain while the stairs
creaked mysteriously as to the ears of a weary and sick man, and while,
through the window near me, curtaining clouds flitted past the face of
the moon as she looked down on the infinite purity of the untrod white
below.

Then I dropped the curtain, and stealing down the stairs like a thief in
my own house, I came again into the great hall, and I went and took down
my sword from its place, and I sat me down in the great arm-chair piling
the cushions around me, with my sword across the arms and my hands
resting on its sheath. At last the dawn came faintly; then a long stain
of yellow light struck across the ribbed and worn floor; then for a
moment, a glorious red glowed through the windows, and then this faded
and the ashes of the dead fire, and the broken meats that strewed the
table, and the tankards that lay on the floor, sprang out under the
truthful day. Then began to come in the women to carry out the things of
last night, and when they saw me sitting there alone, they curtseyed and
looked frightened and would have turned back, but I spoke to them
quietly to clear the floor and build up the fire, for it was a cold
morning and the men must have g