"

My remarks must have glamoured her mind, for her eyes continued to
sparkle, and mine was half a guess that she was leading me on.

"My heaven," she said, "is the abode of the blest."

"Valhalla is the abode of the blest," I asserted. "For look you, who
cares for flowers where flowers always are? in my country, after the iron
winter breaks and the sun drives away the long night, the first blossoms
twinkling on the melting ice-edge are things of joy, and we look, and
look again.

"And fire!" I cried out. "Great glorious fire! A fine heaven yours
where a man cannot properly esteem a roaring fire under a tight roof with
wind and snow a-drive outside."

"A simple folk, you," she was back at me. "You build a roof and a fire
in a snowbank and call it heaven. In my heaven we do not have to escape
the wind and snow."

"No," I objected. "We build roof and fire to go forth from into the
frost and storm and to return to from the frost and storm. Man's life is
fashioned for battle with frost and storm. His very fire and roof he
makes by his battling. I know. For three years, once, I knew never roof
nor fire. I was sixteen, and a man, ere ever I wore woven cloth on my
body. I was birthed in storm, after battle, and my swaddling cloth was a
wolfskin. Look at me and see what manner of man lives in Valhalla."

And look she did, all a-glamour, and cried out:

"You great, yellow giant-thing of a man!" Then she added pensively,
"Almost it saddens me that there may not be such men in my heaven."

"It is a good world," I consoled her. "Good is the plan and wide. There
is room for many heavens. It would seem that to each is given the heaven
that is his heart's desire. A good country, truly, there beyond the
grave. I doubt not I shall leave our feast halls and raid your coasts of
sun and flowers, and steal you away. My mother was so stolen."

And in the pause I looked at her, and she looked at me, and dared to
look. And my blood ran fire. By Odin, this was a woman!

What might have happened I know not, for Pilate, who had ceased from his
talk with Ambivius and for some time had sat grinning, broke the pause.

"A rabbi, a Teutoberg rabbi!" he gibed. "A new preacher and a new
doctrine come to Jerusalem. Now will there be more dissensions, and
riotings, and stonings of prophets. The gods save us, it is a mad-house.
Lodbrog, I little thought it of you. Yet here you are, spouting and
fuming as wildly as any