With her
secret on her lips, she lifted her eyes to his.
A little amused but more pitying, and withal very, very kind, his glance met
hers; and her courage forsook her. Suppose the word she was about to speak
should not make his face friendlier? Suppose his surprise should be succeeded
by haughtiness, or, worse than all, by a touch of that gay scorn? Even at the
memory of it she shrank. Better a crumb than no bread at all. Turning away,
she followed him in silence down the dark passage.
When the moment of parting arrived, and Sebert's hand lay on the last bolt,
that mood was so strong upon her that it seemed to her as though she were
passing out of life into death. Clinging to his cloak, with her face buried in
its folds, she wet it with far bitterer tears than any she had shed over her
murdered kinsmen.
"I wish I had not thought of it! I wish I had not told you!" she sobbed into
the soft muffling. "Only to be near you I thought heaven; and now the Fates
have cheated me even out of that."
The Etheling put his hand under the bent head to raise it that he might hear
what the lips were saying, and she covered his palm with kisses. Then slipping
away, like the elf he had called her, she glided through the narrow space of
the half-open door and was gone, sobbing, out into the night.
Chapter XV
How Fridtjof Cheated The Jotun
Such is the love of women,
Who falsehood meditate,
As if one drove not rough-shod
On slippery ice
A spirited two-year-old
And unbroken horse.
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