without deceit, that here henceforth there is to be
but one rule for Angle and Dane alike; and I shall be as much their King
as yours; and they shall share equally in my justice. You may like it or
not, but that is what will take place."

How they liked it was suggested by a bursting roar, and the scuffling
of many feet as the English leaped forward to protect their new King
and the Danes whirled to meet them, but the women in the gallery did not
wait to see the outcome. In a frenzy of terror, Elfgiva dragged up the
kneeling maids and herded them through the door.

"Go,--before they get into the ante-room!" she gasped. "Do you not see
that he is no longer human? We should be pleading with iron. Go! Before
they tear down the walls!"

Chapter XXVII. Pixie-led

To a good friend's
The paths lie direct,
Though he be far away.
Ha'vama'l.

So Sebert of Ivarsdale went to his tower unhindered; and the rest of
the winter nights, while the winds of the Wolf Month howled about the
palisades, he listened undisturbed to his harper; and the rest of the
winter days he trod in peace the homely routine of his lordship,--in
peace and in absent-eyed silence.

"The old ways are clean fallen out of England, and it becomes a man to
consider diligently how he will order his future," he told Hildelitha
and the old cniht when they inquired the reason for his abstraction.
Perhaps it was the future that was engrossing his mind, but sometimes it
came to him dimly as a strange thing how so small a matter as a slip of
a girl in a page's dress could loom so large that there was no corner of
manor or tower but recalled some trick of her tossing curls, some echo
of her ringing laughter. The platform whereon they had walked in the
moonlight, facing death together, he shunned as he would have shunned a
grave; and the postern where they had parted was haunted ground. Did
he tramp across the snow-crusted fields, memory clothed them again in
nodding grain, and between the golden walls a figure in elfin green
flitted like a will o' the wisp. Did he outsit the maids and men around
his hearth and watch the dying fire with no other companions than his
sleeping dogs, fancy placed a scar-let-cloaked figure on the cushion at
his feet and raised at his knee a face of sweetest friendliness, whose
flower-blue eyes brightened or gloomed in response to his lightest
mood... Once more he heard the harp-notes that told of the wood-nymph