“The old ways are clean fallen out of England, and it becomes a man to consider diligently how he will order his future,” he told Hildelitha and the old cniht when they inquired the reason for his abstraction. Perhaps it was the future that was engrossing his mind, but sometimes it came to him dimly as a strange thing how so small a matter as a slip of a girl in a page’s dress could loom so large that there was no corner of manor or tower but recalled some trick of her tossing curls, some echo of her ringing laughter. The platform whereon they had walked in the moonlight, facing death together, he shunned as he would have shunned a grave; and the postern where they had parted was haunted ground. Did he tramp across the snow-crusted fields, memory clothed them again in nodding grain, and between the golden walls a figure in elfin green flitted like a will o’ the wisp. Did he outsit the maids and men around his hearth and watch the dying fire with no other companions than his sleeping dogs, fancy placed a scar-let-cloaked figure on the cushion at his feet and raised at his knee a face of sweetest friendliness, whose flower-blue eyes brightened or gloomed in response to his lightest mood... Once more he heard the harp-notes that told of the wood-nymph’s sorrow;... once more he heard his laughing denunciation;... again there looked back at him the wounded eyes... Whenever this vision rose before him, he stirred in his chair and turned his face from the light. “May heaven grant that she is not remembering it!” he would murmur. And for a while he would see her as he had left her in the garden, holding herself so bravely erect in her shining robes, her white cheeks mocking at her smiling lips. A great well of pity would spring in his breast, drowning his heart with its pent-up gushing, and the waters would rise, rise, until they had touched his eyes. But always before they brimmed over, another change would come. Slowly, the rigid figure before him would relax into an attitude of idle grace, the white cheeks would regain their color, the eyes their brightness, and—presto! she stood before him as he had seen her from the passage, a high-born maid among her kind, favored by the King, guarded by her lover. When he reached this point, he always rose with an abruptness that swept his goblet to the floor and awakened the sleeping dogs. “Fool!” he would spurn himself. “Mad puffed-up fool! Keep in mind that she has her consolers, while you have only your wound. If she could stake her all upon the son of Lodbrok and then give him up at the turn of the wheel, is it in any way likely that she is dead with tears for you? What? It may easily be that she has had a new love for every month that has passed.”