Sometimes a woman’s lighter laughter would mingle with the peal. Sometimes, through the sway-ing branches, Randalin caught sight of the flower-fair face of an English girl, bending between the shaggy yellow heads of the captors. Once she came upon a brawny Viking employing his huge fingers to twine a golden chain around a white throat. The girl’s face was dimpling bewitchingly as she held aside her shining hair. Randalin had an impulse of triumph. “I wish that Sister Wynfreda could see that, now, since it is her belief that Danes are always overbearing toward their captives,” she told herself. “This one has no appearance of having felt blows or known hard labor. She could not have been entertained with greater liberality in her father’s house—” She broke off suddenly, as the words suggested a new train of thought. This girl must have been driven from her father’s house by Danes, even as she herself had been driven forth by the English. Yet here was she eating with her foes, taking gold from their hands! Could she have honor who would thus make friends with the slayers of her kin? Randalin watched her wonderingly until leaves shut out the picture. Another sentinel hailed her, and she gave him absently her customary answer. He pointed to a great striped tent of red and white linen, adorned with fluttering streamers and guarded by more sentries in shining mail; and she rode toward it in a daze. More revellers sprawled under these trees, and she looked at them curiously. The women here did not seem to be amusing themselves so well. One was weeping; and one—a slip of a girl with a face like a rose—was trying vainly to rise from her place beside a drunken warrior, who held her hands and strove to pull her lips down to his wine-stained mouth. In imagination Randalin felt again Norman’s arm around her waist, and a wild pity was quickened in her. This was worse than drudgery, worse than blows! For the credit of Danish warriors, it was well that Sister Wynfreda could not see this. Again her own words raised a startling apparition. What had been the Sister’s last cry of warning? “It is not their cruelty I fear for you. Child, listen! It is not their blows—” Could it be possible that this was what— Like a merciless answer came a scream from the girl,—a short piercing cry of horror and loathing and agonized appeal as she was drawn down upon the leering face. At that cry, childhood’s blind trust died forever in Randalin. As she rode past the pair, with clenched hands and flashing eyes, she knew without reasoning that tortures would not tear from her the secret of her disguise. When the sentinel before the tent challenged her roughly, it was her tongue, not her brain, that answered him. “I have war news for the King.” In a twinkling he had dropped his spear, plucked her from her saddle, and was marching her toward the entrance by her collar.