s decree

XI. When my Lord comes Home from War

XII. The Foreign Page

XIII. When Might made Right

XIV. How the Fates cheated Randalin

XV. How Fridtjof cheated the Jotun

XVI. The Sword of Speech

XVII. The Judgment of the Iron Voice

XVIII. What the Red Cloak hid

XIX. The Gift of the Elves

XX. A Royal Reckoning

XXI. With the Jotun as Chamberlain

XXII. How the Lord of Ivarsdale paid his Debt

XXIII. A Blood-Stained Crown

XXIV. On the Road to London

XXV. The King's Wife

XXVI. In the Judgment Hall

XXVII. Pixie-Led

XXVIII. When Love meets Love

XXIX. The Ring of the Coiled Snake

XXX. When the King takes a Queen

XXXI. The Twilight of the Gods

XXXII. In Time's Morning

THE WARD OF KING CANUTE

Foreword

There is an old myth of a hero who renewed his strength each time he
touched the earth, and finally was overcome by being raised in the air
and crushed. Whether or not the Angles risked a like fate as they raised
themselves away from the primitive virtues that had been their life and
strength, no one can tell; but it has been well said that when Northern
blood mingled with English blood at the time of the Danish Conquest, the
Anglo-Saxon race touched the earth again.

Chapter I. The Fall of the House of Frode

Full stocked folds
I saw at the sons of Fitjung,
Now they carry beggars' staffs;
Wealth is
Like the twinkling of an eye,
The most unstable of friends.
Ha'vama'l.

As the blackness of the midsummer night paled, the broken towers and
wrecked walls of the monastery loomed up dim and stark in the gray
light. The long-drawn sigh of a waking world crept through the air and
rustled the ivy leaves. The pitying angel of dreams, who had striven all
night long to restore the plundered shrine and raise from their graves
the band of martyred nuns, ceased from his ministrations, softly as a
bubble frees itself from the pipe that shaped it, and floated away on
the breath of the wind. Through a breach in the moss-grown wall, the
first sunbeam stole in and pointed a bright finger across the cloister
garth at the charred spot in the centre, where missals and parchment
rolls had made a roaring fire to warm the invaders' blood-stained hands.

As the lark rose through the brightening air to greet the coming day,
a woman in the tunic