r fast, and
she did not even answer him. "Shall I have at him again, for Einar's
sake?" said the good Orme, eager to procure happiness for somebody. At
that she shook her head. "He would not have it. I am sure of that."
So was Orme in his sober mind.

Meantime the neighbours were thronging about Thorbeorn, pledging him in
horns of mead and ale. Many of them offered him stock or provision for
the voyage; many cried that they would go with him to the new
settlement. They would never thole a new master, they said, and fully
believed it. Some thirty souls did actually go on the voyage. This
was the greatest day of Thorbeorn's life so far.

VII

Thorbeorn's ship lay ready for him in Rawnhaven; but there was much to
do, what with hay and corn harvest, to get in, before he could leave.
He sailed, then, fully late in the year--himself and his household,
thirty or more of his friends beside, his house-pillars and all the
stock he had left beside. He was burning to be off, the old adventurer
that he was, but Gudrid was not of his way of feeling about it. The
Icelanders were a race of stoics. What was to be held them spellbound.
Far from hindering adventure, it promoted it; for you never knew but
what Fate intended you to succeed. But Gudrid had seen how she might
have been happy, and could not understand how otherwise she could be.
The last night at home, so she fondly called Iceland, was spent with
Orme and Halldis, to whose kindness she thawed at last. She cried upon
Halldis's broad bosom, and revealed herself. "You see how it is with
me now," she said. "If I never meet him again I shall never love
another man. And I see no way of meeting him--and so I must be
wretched." Then she fairly wailed: "I might have been so happy--I
might have been!" till it was pity to hear her.

Presently she took out her token and showed it to Halldis. "That is
all I have of Einar's," she said. Halldis said that she had the girdle
he had given her. "Yes," she said, "but this has his teeth-marks in
it." Then she sat up on Halldis's lap and looked shyly at her, saying,
"I am going to ask you something."

"Ask, my child."

"If it should happen ever that I come home again, and want to see
Einar, will you give him this from me? He will know then what to do."

Halldis promised. "He is mostly here every year," she said. "But
there's no saying how it may find him."

"It will find him waiting for me," Gudrid said. "He