man's reproach.

"It would show no more than friendship if you said that you were sorry
to have me go," she told him with quivering lips. "Are you so eager in
getting me off that you cannot say you will miss me?"

But the young lord only laughed good-humoredly as he poured the wine.
"What a child you are! Do you not know those things without my telling
you? And as for missing you, I am not likely to have time. The first
chance you get, you will slip back to me if you do not, I will come
after you and flog you into the bargain; be there no forgetting!"

She could not laugh as she would once have done; instead she choked in
the cup and pushed it from her. A passionate yearning came over her for
one such word, one such look, as he would give the dream-lady when she
should come. With her secret on her lips, she lifted her eyes to his.

A little amused but more pitying, and withal very, very kind, his glance
met hers; and her courage forsook her. Suppose the word she was about to
speak should not make his face friendlier? Suppose his surprise should
be succeeded by haughtiness, or, worse than all, by a touch of that gay
scorn? Even at the memory of it she shrank. Better a crumb than no bread
at all. Turning away, she followed him in silence down the dark passage.

When the moment of parting arrived, and Sebert's hand lay on the last
bolt, that mood was so strong upon her that it seemed to her as though
she were passing out of life into death. Clinging to his cloak, with her
face buried in its folds, she wet it with far bitterer tears than any
she had shed over her murdered kinsmen.

"I wish I had not thought of it! I wish I had not told you!" she sobbed
into the soft muffling. "Only to be near you I thought heaven; and now
the Fates have cheated me even out of that."

The Etheling put his hand under the bent head to raise it that he might
hear what the lips were saying, and she covered his palm with kisses.
Then slipping away, like the elf he had called her, she glided through
the narrow space of the half-open door and was gone, sobbing, out into
the night.

Chapter XV. How Fridtjof Cheated The Jotun

"'Such is the love of women,
Who falsehood meditate,
As if one drove not rough-shod
On slippery ice
A spirited two-year-old
And unbroken horse.
Ha'vama'l.

I trust my sword; I trust my steed;
But most I trust myself at need,'"

the fair-haired scald sang exultingly to the Dan