Now she slipped from the bedstead and set her feet on the deck, facing us. I saw her look pass quickly over our dress, and minded that we were in no holiday trim. She saw Bertric in the thrall's dress, and Dalfin in his torn and scorched and sea-stained green hunting tunic and leather hose, and myself only in the Norse dress, and that war torn and grimed with the fight in the hall, which seemed so many years ago now, and with the long sea struggle that came thereafter. Yet she did not shrink from us. "I cannot understand it all," she said. "How comes it that you are here, and thus? You seem as men who have fought, and are hardly yet restored after the weariness of fight." "We have fought, lady, and have fared ill. We were captives and have escaped; and as we fled by sea we fell in with this ship when at our wits' end." So I answered, for my comrades looked at me. The fight was mine, so to speak. "It seems well for me," she said, smiling somewhat sadly. "I had no thought but to be burnt. Now I have escaped that. Tell me how it may have been." I did so, wondering all the time how she came to be in that terrible place, for she spoke of escape. That she would tell us in her own time, no doubt. "What can be done now?" she asked, speaking to us as to known friends, very bravely. If she had doubts of us, she hid them. Perhaps that we owned to being escaped captives explained much to her--else she had surely wondered that the tattered Dalfin claimed to be a prince. Yet he was princely, both in look and bearing, as he rose up and made himself known, with a bow which none but a courtier could have compassed. "Bertric is shipmaster," I said; "he will answer." "The ship is yours, lady, and we can but serve you," he answered. "Now, it depends on the wind when it comes with dawn, as no doubt it will, what course we can take, for we are too few to work the ship rightly. We had thought of trying to make the Norway shore at the nearest point we could reach, and so setting the ship, and the hero who lies in her, in the hands of those who will do him the honour that he needs at the last." At that, to our great surprise, she shook her head. "That you cannot do; at least, you may not go back to the land whence he came. Hall and town may be in the hands of our worst foe, else I had not been here." "We cannot be sure of making your haven in any case. We should have sought such haven as we might, had we been alone." "And you thought nothing of the treasure, which will be surely taken from you?" "We had not thought of it, lady. We have been on board the ship but three hours or so. What thought might have come to us I cannot say. But it is not ours, and we could not rob the dead." He said that quite simply, and as the very truth, which must be to us as a matter of honour. "Tell me who you are," she said. "The prince I know already. Dalfin, I think it was, an Irish name."