Before him, irradiated by the slant sunrays, he saw three handsome young noblewomen, walking arm in arm. All were bareheaded, each with a forehead-ribbon round her flowing hair. The middlemost was tall, full-contoured, with very black locks. She was enveloped in a crimson mantle. The girl on her right was of medium height, slender, with glossy brown tresses and wore a mantle of dark blue. The third was small and very lovely, her hair golden, her cheeks pink, her eyes blue, all set off by a mantle of bright grass-green. Thorkell thought them norns come to escort him to Valhalla. A cloud, gray and then inky black, swept between him and his outlook. He felt himself topple. II When Thorkell came to himself he was in bed in the pitch dark. He felt about him and found that he was in a sort of bunk, a wall on his right hand and, on his left, a polished board. He ran his hand along its upper edge. He was rather deep down in his berth and under him was an infinity of yielding feather-bed. He was well covered with warm quilts. He tried to stretch, but the space was too short for him. He composed himself and slept again. When he woke the second time it was daylight and he saw by his bunk a tall, spare, elderly noblewoman, severe-looking, hatchet-faced, with a lean and stringy neck and gray hair. She was clad in garments of undyed wool of the usual rusty brown. “Son,” she warned him, “you must not try to speak. Drink this slowly.” And, as he weakly tried to raise himself in the wall-bed, she supported him with her right arm, at the same time holding to his lips with her left hand a silver goblet. Thorkell tasted a delicious posset, compounded of milk, mead, honey, barley-meal, and of other ingredients unknown to him. He swallowed most of it, fell back among his down pillows and slept again at once. His third waking was again in full daylight. He felt more like himself. He saw that his bed occupied most of one side of a fair-sized room, wainscoted in dark wood and with a low ceiling, similarly panelled. Opposite his bunk stood a high, narrow table. In the wall by the foot of his bunk was a low doorway, its door shut. In the opposite wall was a window, whose contracted casements had small panes of fish-gut membrane, stretched across wooden lattices. The panes were bright with the glare of brilliant sunshine full on them and much light filtered through, so that the room was well-lighted. By his bed, facing the window, in one of the two chairs, sat a tall, magnificently dignified, elderly man, gray-haired, ruddy of complexion, broad-shouldered, wrapped in a reddish-brown mantle of fine wool. He wore a gold neck-chain from which hung a large, flat, oval gold amulet-case.