ished over it,
without noticing that the Norman still stood where the chief had left
him, with every appearance of being equally bereft of his senses.

With parted lips, and hands nervously opening and shutting by his side,
he stood staring away into the dusk before him, until the voices of
those who were coming after with the spoils fell on his ear and aroused
him. Then he raised to the stars a face that was fairly convulsed with
excitement, and took the rest of the climb in three wild leaps.

"It is open to my sight at last!" he muttered over and over, as he
hurried through the darkness toward the lighted booths. "Heaven be
thanked, it is open to my sight at last!"

As he reached the end of the largest hut and was turning the corner in
eager haste, an arm reached quickly out of the shadow and touched his
cloak. Instinctively his hand went to his knife; but it fell away the
next instant in a very different gesture, as Helga's voice whispered in
his ear:

"Alwin,--it is I! I have waited for you since the first noise of the
landing. I have a--hush, you must not do that! I have need of my lips to
speak with No, no! Listen; I wish to warn you--"

"And I must tell you what has just occurred." Alwin's excitement bore
down her caution. "I have guessed the riddle of what my service is to
be,--or, to tell it truthfully, luck has guessed it for me, owl that I
am! Here has it--"

But Helga's hand fell softly over his mouth. "Dumb as well as blind
shall you be, till I have finished! Already I have stayed out long
enough to excite suspicion. Listen to my warning; Kark suspects that
your complexion is shallow. Yesterday I overheard him put the question
to Tyrker, whether or not it were possible that a paint could color a
man's skin dark so that it would not wear off."

"Devil take the--"

"Hush, that is not all! I have never thought it worth while to tell you,
in the few words we have had together; but now I know that the creature
has suspected us ever since the day when Leif came upon us on the bluff.
The day after that, Kark dared to say to me, 'Is a shield-maiden as
fickle as other women, for all her steel shirt? In Greenland, Helga,
Gilli's daughter, loved an Englishman.' I beat him soundly for it, yet I
could not uproot the thought from his mind; and now--"

"And now I tell you that it is of no consequence what he thinks," Alwin
interrupted her, eagerly. "I have to-night found out a means by which I
am as certain to