age was holding behind Norman of
Baddeby fell upon the gemmed collar that was his principal ornament, and
the sight wrought a subtle change in her mood. The collar had been her
father's; she could not look at it without seeing again his ruddy old
face with its grim mouth and faded kindly eyes. Beside this vision rose
another,--the vision of this beloved face dead in the moonlight, with
Fridtjof's near it, his brave smile frozen on his young lips. From that
moment, softness and shrinking died out in her bearing as out of her
heart, and her blood was turned to fire within her,--the liquid fire of
the North. Hour after hour, she sat in rigid waiting while the endless
line of servants ran to and fro with their silver dishes and the
merriment grew and spread and the clinking came faster and louder and
the voices grew thicker and wilder.

When the wave of good-will and fellowship had reached its height, like
one who would ride in upon its crest the Gainer rose to his feet and
began speaking to the King. His manner was less smoothly deferential
than when addressing Edmund, she noticed, affecting more the air of
bluff frankness which one might who wished to disarm any suspicion of
flattering; but she could not hear what he said because of the noise
around him. The first words she heard distinctly were Canute's, as he
paused with upraised goblet to look at the Mercian. Like an arrow his
voice cleft the uproar, so that here and there men checked the speech on
their lips to look at him, and their neighbors, observing them, paused
also, until the lull extended from corner to corner.

"Strangely do you ask," he said. "Why should I give you more than Edmund
gave you?"

She had no difficulty in hearing Edric this time. Aggressively honest,
his words rang out with startling sharpness: "Because it was for
you that I went against Edmund, and from faithfulness to you that I
afterwards destroyed him."

Out of the stillness that followed, a voice cried, "Are you mad?" and
there was the grating of chairs thrust hastily back. But, after a great
wrench, her heart stood still within her as through the madness she
perceived the purpose. As well as Edric of Mercia she knew that the
young Viking's vulnerable point was his longing for his own self-esteem,
a craving so unreckoning in its fervor that--should he have the guilty
consciousness the traitor counted on--rather than endure his own
reproach for cowardice he would be equal to the wild bra