e two weeks ago last Saturday! There's no end with a woman,
either backwards or forwards!"

"For goodness' sake," cried Joscelyn, "stop grumbling and get on with
it!"

"There's no end to a man's grumbling either," said Martin; "but I'll
get on with it.")

The tale that Harding had to tell Proud Rosalind was a long one, but I
will make as short of it as I can. He told her how in his own country
he was sprung of the race of Volundr, who was a God and a King and a
Smith all in one; but he had been ill-used and banished, and had since
haunted England where men knew him as Wayland, and he did miracles. But
in his own northern land his strain continued, until Harding's father,
a king himself, was like his ancestor defeated and banished, and
crossed the water with his young son and a chest of relics of Old
Wayland's work--a ring, a girdle, a crown, and a silver robe; a sword
and bow which Rosalind knew already; and other things as well. And the
boy grew up filled with the ancient wrongs of his ancestor, and he went
about the country seeking Wayland's haunts; and wherever he found them
he found a mossy legend, neglected and unproved, of how the god worked,
or had worked, for any man's pence, and put his divine craft to
laborers' service. And as in Rosalind the dream had grown of building
up her fathers' honor again, so Harding had from boyhood nursed his
dream of establishing that of the half-forgotten god. And he, who had
inherited his ancestor's craft in metal, coming at last through Sussex
settled at Bury, where the legend lay on its sick-bed; and he set up
his shop by the ferry so that he might doctor it. And there he did his
work in two ways; for as the Red Smith he did such work as might be
done better by a hundred men, but as Wayland he did what could only
have been done better by the god. And the toll he collected for that
work he saved, year-in-year-out, till he should have enough to build
the god a shrine. And, leaving this visible evidence behind him, he
meant to depart to his own land, and let the faith in Wayland wax of
itself. And then Harding told Rosalind how he had first seen the hart
when it was a calf six years before at midsummer, and how it had led
him to the Wishing-Well; and he had marked it for his own. And how in
the same year he had first noticed Rosalind, a girl not yet sixteen,
and, for the fire of kings in her that all her poverty could not
extinguish, chosen her for his mate.

"And year by y