And with that I went into the brightness below me, and troubled no more for anything. CHAPTER III. HOW WILFRID MET ECGBERT THE ATHELING. It was indeed Thorleif whom I saw as the deadly faintness of utter weariness and want of food came over me, and I sank. The Danes had hardly lost sight of me from the ships, for they had drifted backward and forward on the tide as I drifted, and I was never more than a mile from them. Until the tide turned to the eastward there had been no wind of any use to them, and that which came with sunset was barely enough to give them steerage way. So they had watched me for want of somewhat else to do, being worn out with the long fight; and when I was far off, some keen-sighted seaman would spy my head as it rose on a wave, and cry that the Saxon was yet swimming. Now, if there is one thing that the northern folk of our kin think much of in the way of sports, it is swimming, and it seems that I won high praise from all. Maybe they did not consider how a man who is trying to win his home again from captivity is likely to do more than his best. At all events, I had never so much as tried a swim like that before, nor do I think that I could compass it again. Presently, when the turn of the tide brought with it no eddy into the bay which set me homeward, Thorleif would let me go no longer, and followed me in the boat with two men; which was easy enough, for I swam between the ship and the place where the red glow of burning Weymouth still shone in the northern sky. He could not leave me to drown. For a time, in the growing dusk, he could not find me. Then the sea fires showed me black against their glow, and the sea tempted him, and he leaped in after me, singing to cheer me, for it was plain that I was nearly spent. When he brought me up from the depth again I had little of the drowned man about me, for I had fainted. I remember coming round painfully after that swoon, and eating and drinking, and straightway falling into a dreamless sleep on the deck of the ship; and I also remember the untoldly evil and fishy smell of the seal oil they had rubbed me with. When I came to myself, my first thought was that a solid wall of that smell stood round me; but such were the virtues of the oil and the rubbing that when I woke after eighteen hours' sleep I was not so much as stiff. It would ill beseem me to complain thereof, therefore, but it might have been fresher.