was out of the longing for power that ever lies in the heart of
youth. We had done no more than laugh thereat had you been content
to try to win your will with the ancient wiles of woman that lie in
beauty and weakness. But for the evil ways in which you have
wrought the land is accursed, and will be so as long as we suffer
you. Go hence, and meet elsewhere what fate befalls you. In the
skill you have in the seaman's craft is your one hope. We leave it
you."

Then, without a word of answer or so much as a look aside, the girl
of her own accord steps into the boat; and at a sign from their
lord the two men launch her from the shelving sand into the sea,
following her, knee deep, among the little breakers that hardly
hinder their steps. They see that in her look is deepest hate and
wrath, but they pay no heed to it. And even as their hands leave
the gunwale, the girl goes to the mast, and with the skill and ease
of long custom hoists the sail, and so making fast the halliard
deftly, comes aft again to ship the steering oar, and seat herself
as the breeze wakes the ripples at the bow and the land slips away
from her. She has gone, and never looks back.

Then a sort of sigh whispers among the women folk on shore; but it
is not as a sigh of grief, but rather as if a danger had passed
from the land. They know that the boat must needs drive but as the
wind takes her, for oars wherewith to row against it are none, and
the long summer spell of seaward breezes has set in. The jarl folds
his arms and bides still in his place, and the two men still stand
in the water, watching. And so the boat and its fair burden of
untold ill fades into the mist and grows ghostly, and is lost to
sight; and across the dunes the clouds gather, and the thunder
mutters from inland with the promise of long-looked-for rain to a
parched and starving folk.

* * * *

Through the long summer morning Offa, the young King of Mercia, has
hunted across the rich Lindsey marshes which lie south of the
Humber; and now in the heat of the noon he will leave his party
awhile and ride with one thane only to the great Roman bank which
holds back the tides, and seek a cool breath from the salt sea,
whose waves he can hear. So he sets spurs to his great white steed,
and with the follower after him, rides to where the high sand dunes
are piled against the bank, and reins up on their grassy summit,
and looks eastward across the most desolate sands in all England,
gu