ted men, as I do still."

"They mean no harm," said Gudrid. "They do after their kind."

"But their kind is not mine. To be held in a man's arm is horrible to
me."

"It is good to me, sometimes," said Gudrid.

"But when I saw you with Thorstan's child about to be born--and saw how
rich and sedate you walked the ways, and how peace sat upon your
forehead like a wreath, then I grudged you." Freydis turned round in
the bed and showed her burning face. "And I said, 'This woman has a
secret joy, and for all she is so quiet and still she is stronger than
I.' And when the child died I was glad. I said, 'Now we are level
again, but I will be better than you, for I will have a child which
shall live and be strong like me.' But you have had yours first, and
it is a boy. So you are better than me still." Then her eyes filled
with hot tears, which made her eyelids blink.

"Oh, Freydis," Gudrid said, "you don't grudge me my boy?"

"No, no, it is not that. It is that I am ashamed. You are good, and I
am very bad. I hate myself now."

Gudrid kissed her.

"Tell me, Freydis, now," she said, "why did you call your girl Walgerd?"

Freydis did not want to answer, but presently she said: "I should have
called her Gudrid if that had been lucky. But we must not use the
names of living persons for the new-born, so I called her Walgerd,
because yours had been called so. I went as near to you as I could."

It seemed to hurt Freydis to talk about it, but Gudrid kissed her
again, and went away feeling happy about her. "It is good to be loved,
even by Freydis," she said to Karlsefne, whose answer was, "Who could
help loving you?"

XXIX

But before the ship-building was began Freydis changed her mind, and
said that she would go home with the rest. Nobody caring to stop alone
out there without some chieftain over them, it came to it that all must
go home in one ship. They killed what stock they could not take alive,
and sailed out of the river at the beginning of summer. Gudrid's boy
Snorre was just two years old, and Karlsefne was anxious to be safe at
home before he had a brother or sister.

They waited about at the river's mouth for a fair wind, then set all
sail and ran before it northerly along the coast. So they came again
to Markland and stayed there for certain days. It was there that
Karlsefne and some of the crew, on shore after game, surprised some
savages in a hollow of the woods: a bearded man, t