urch, all shouting and singing
together for joy of such an easy victory. But when they were within a
dozen yards of the building there came suddenly upon them from the slit
apertures and the tower a cloud of poisoned arrows, and Ulric lost more
men in those few minutes than ever in his life before. I was far away
behind, but I saw all. I saw Ulric raise his great two-edged sword and
cut down to the ground the old man who had led them there. I saw them
drag the trunk of a tree to the church door and batter it in, and not
one Briton escaped. Ask that old man, Powers, what they have found in
the fields here."

Powers called a laborer digging on a potato-patch close at hand.

"What is the name of that ruin?" he asked.

The man surveyed it doubtfully.

"There ain't any one as rightly knows, sir," he admitted. "Our vicar has
looked at the walls, and reckoned it must have been a church."

"Have any Danish trophies ever been found about here?"

The old man smiled.

"You see this field, sir?" he answered. "I've heard my grandfather say
that when he used to plow that one day it must have been sown with human
bones. There's an old horn mug been found here, too, that they say, from
the shape of it, must have belonged to some foreigners. It's in the
British Museum in London."

Powers threw him a shilling and turned away with Eleanor.

"You have been here before," he said, in a low tone.

"Never since I came with Ulric," she answered dreamily, "and that must
have been a very, very long time ago. There were no houses in those
days, nor any fields. Yet the land is the same, the land and the sea.
They do not change."

They sat down on a sandy knoll. Powers took her hand in his.

"Dear," he said softly, "it is not well for you to dwell upon these
fancies. Try and think instead of the future--our future.

"Fancies," she repeated scornfully. "They are not fancies. They are
memories."

"Call them what you will, dear," he said, "but let them lie. They belong
to a dead past. It is the future which concerns us."

She drew a little closer to him. For the first time he felt his pressure
upon her fingers returned.

It seemed to him as she sat there, with quivering lips, that it was
indeed the weary shop-girl of the Edgware Road who was with him once
more. There was a light in her eyes as of some new understanding.

A great yearning swept over Powers with the memory of that rain-swept,
wind-tossed bay. All the scientific aspir