zenness of
flinging the avowal in the teeth of his assembled court. Her pulses
began to pound in a furious dance as the same flash of intuition showed
her the rock upon which the Gainer's audacious steering was going to
wreck him.

For no skulking guilt was in the face of the new King of England as he
met the startled glances, but instead a kind of savage joy that widened
his nostrils and drew his lips away from his teeth in a terrible smile.

"Now much do I thank whatever god has moved you to open speech," he
said, "for with every fibre of my body have I long wanted to requite you
for that faithfulness. Knowing that you were coming to-night to ask it,
I have the reward ready. Never was recompense given with a better
will." Leaping to his feet, he hurled the goblet in his hand against
the opposite wall so that it was shattered on the stone behind the
embroidered hangings. At the signal the tapestry was lifted, and in the
light stood Eric of Norway, leaning on a mighty battle-axe. To him the
King cried in a loud voice, all the irony gone from it, leaving it awful
as the voice of Thor at Ragnarok. "Do your work where all can see you,
Eric Jarl, that no man shall accuse me of being afraid to bear my deeds.
And let Norman Leofwinesson die with his lord for the slaying of Frode
of Avalcomb."

A roar of hideous sound--a confusion of overturned lights, of screeching
servants, of writhing struggling bodies--above it all, the vision
of that glittering axe poised in the air--then flashing
downward,--Randalin's recollections blurred, ran together, and faded out
in broken snatches.

She recalled a brief space of something like sleep-walking as the
soldiers led her through branching corridors to this room, and fetched
for her attendant the only woman available, a wench they had taken
from trencher-washing in the royal kitchen. She remembered irritably
rejecting the woman's clumsy services and sending her to sleep on her
pallet, while she herself walked to and fro with her surging thoughts
until sheer physical exhaustion forced her to throw herself upon the
bed. After that she remembered--nothing.

"I am glad that I did not disgrace my kin by screaming or fainting," she
reflected now, as she raised herself stiffly. "I am glad I did that much
credit to my name." She flushed as her hand, touching the pillow, found
it wet, and for an instant the bearing of her head was less erect. "I do
not remember what I dreamed," she murmured,