It was an irregular
one-storied building,--or, rather, group of buildings connected by covered
passages,--and every kind of material had been used in its construction,--
brick and stone and wood,--while some of the smaller offices were even
straw-thatched and wattled.
"It is the waste-place of ruins," Elfgiva said on the day of their arrival,
when the monk who guided them proudly identified the brick portions as
fragments of the old Roman Temple to Apollo, the wooden door-posts as beams
from the Saxon Seberht's refectory, and the stone walls as contributions from
Dunstan's chapel, which the Danes of the year one thousand and twelve had
reduced to a crumbling pile.
To-day, a fortnight later, Randalin repeated the comment with a despondent
addition: "It is the waste-place of ruins, and ruins have come to dwell in it.
I can believe that it is no lie about the Fates to call them women, when they
put like with like in so housewifely a manner."
She was alone in one of the bare mouldering rooms, leaning against the
deep-set small-paned window which had become her accustomed post. It offered
no pleasanter outlook than the snow-powdered thicket beyond the wall and a
glimpse of the Thames, spreading silently over the surrounding marshes; but
from it her fancy's eye could follow the mighty stream around its eastern bend
to the point where the City walls began, and Saint Paul's shingled steeple
reared itself in lofty pride.
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