stir into the woods, where the drifts were over heavy in the deep
shaws to be very safe to a stranger. But we had some good days when
word came that the foresters had harboured an old boar in a
sheltered place. And to attack the fearless beast when he is thus
penned and at bay amid snow walls, is warriors' sport indeed.

But while the snow fell whirling in the cold blasts from the sea
round the great low-roofed hall I must needs bide within, and so I
saw more of the maiden Sexberga than before, as she sat at her
wheel with the lady, her mother, and the maidens of the house at
the upper end of the hall, while the men wrought at their indoor
work of mending and making horse gear and tool handles and the
like, below the fire that burnt in the centre.

And so it had been like enough that soon I should have bound my
heart to this pleasant place with ties that would have been hard to
break, but for some words that came about by chance. For there had
begun to spring up in my mind a great liking for the words and ways
of Sexberga, who had been pleasant in my eyes from the very first
time that I had seen her and her mother in Earl Wulfnoth's
courtyard.

And I think that there is no wonder in this, for these ladies were
ever most kind to me, and long were the days since I had spoken
with any in such a home as this. Nor, as I have said, should I be
blamed for forgetting old days at Bures in this wise.

Now, soon after Christmas, when there came one of those days when
men must needs keep under cover, I sat by the fire trimming arrows,
and presently it chanced that the lady and I were alone in the
hall, for the maidens were preparing the supper elsewhere, and the
housecarles had not yet come in from cattle yard and sheep pens.
And we talked quietly of this and that, as her wheel hummed and
clicked cheerfully the while, and at last some word of mine led her
to say:

"I have heard little of your own folk, Redwald. I do not know even
their names."

"After my father was slain, I had none left but my mother," I said.
"We are distant kinsfolk of Ulfkytel, our earl, but we have no near
kin."

"Was your mother's name Hertha?" she said, naturally enough, for I
had never named her, always speaking, as one will, of her as my
mother only.

I looked up wondering, for I could not think how she knew that
name, or indeed any other than that of Siric, my father, and maybe
Thorgeir, my grandfather, for Olaf had told them at first, when