nown.

"It is an uncanny place," said Erling; "which may be all the better
for us. At any rate, we will go and look into it. Stay, though; no
need to make a plain track to it hence."

The cattle tracks bent round and about it, and as we followed one
it seemed at last to lead straight into the ruin. So we went with
it, and found the entrance to the place. Last year the cattle had
used it for a shelter, but not this, and there were no signs that
any man had followed them into it. And then I knew what the place
was, and wondered at its desertion little, for it was a Roman
villa. Any Saxon knows that the old heathen gods those hard folk
worshipped still hang about the walls where their images used to
hold sway, not now in the fair shapes they feigned for them, but as
the devils we know them to have been, horned and hoofed and tailed.
Minding which a fear came on me that the marks we took for those
made by harmless kine were of those unearthly footsteps, and I
reined back.

"What is there to fear?" said Erling--"fiends? Well, they make no
footmarks like honest cattle, surely. Moreover, I suppose that a
good Christian man need not fear them; and Odin's man will not, so
long as the horses do not. The beasts would know if aught of that
sort was about."

Whereon I made the holy sign on my breast, and rode to the gap in
the white walls which had been the doorway, and looked in. I
suppose that some half-Roman Briton had made the house after the
pattern his lords had taught him, or else that it did indeed belong
to the Roman commander of that force which kept the border, with
the Sutton camp hard by for his men. If this was so, the Briton had
kept the place up till Offa came and burnt the roof over it, for
the black charcoal of the timbers lay on the floors. Only in one
place the pavement of little square stones set in iron-hard cement
still showed in bright patches of red and black and yellow
patterning, where a rabbit had scratched aside the gathered
rubbish. Across walls and floors the brambles trailed, and the
yellow wallflower crowned the ruins of the stonework everywhere.

One could see that there had been many rooms and a courtyard, bits
of wall still marking the plan of the place. And in this one corner
there was shelter enough in a stone-floored room whose walls were
more than a man's height. The cattle had used that for long.

"This is luck," said my comrade. "Here we can leave the horses, and
if one does happen