It was a clever appeal. Forgetting, for the moment, humiliation in responsibility, the young leader whirled to his men. A gesture, a muttered order, and they were drawing back among the trees in silent retreat. A few steps more, and the bushes had blotted out the Ironside and his thanes. CHAPTER XI. When My Lord Comes Home From War One’s own house is best, Small though it be; At home is every one his own master. Bleeding at heart is he Who has to ask For food at every mealtide. Hávamál. Slowly the bleak light warmed into golden radiance and the touch of dawn strung the scattered bird-notes into a chain of joyous song. Passing at last from the forest shades, the men of Ivarsdale came out into the grassy lane-like road that wound away over the Middlesex hills. The Destroyer had not passed this way, it seemed, for the oat-fields stretched before them in unbroken silvery sheen; and the straight young corn dared to rustle its green ribbons boastfully. Fowls still uncaptured crowed lustily in adjacent barnyards; and now and again, sweet as echoes from elfin horns, came the tinkling music of cow-bells. Here and there, the little shock-headed boys who were driving their charges afield paused knee-deep in rosy clover to watch the band ride by. “Yon must be a mighty warrior,” they whispered as they stared at the sober young leader. “Take notice how his eyes gaze straight ahead, as though he were seeking more people to overcome.” And they spoke enviously of the red-cloaked page who sat on the croup of the leader’s white charger. “See the sword he wears in his gay clothes. Likely he also has been in battle. He must needs be happy who can strike out into the world like that.” Envying, they gazed after him until the horses’ hoofs threw up a yellow wall between. They would have opened their wide mouths wider had they known that the red-cloaked page was looking wistfully at them and their kine and the nodding clover. “It must be very enjoyable to wander all day in the peace of the meadows and hear nothing louder than cow-bells,” she was thinking. “It is good to see creatures that no man is stabbing or doing harm to.” Through warm sunshine, tempered by fresh breezes, they came yet deeper into the drowsy farmland. Gradually the yeomen-soldiers, who had been wrangling over the mystery of Edric’s actions, dropped one by one into lazy silence, or set their tongues to whistling cleverly turned answers to the bird-calls in the hedges. Another mile, and from somewhere in the fields came the swinging chant of a ploughman, as he turned the soil between the rows of rustling corn,— “Hail, Mother Earth, thou feeder of folk! Be thou growing, by goodness of God, Filled with fodder, the folk to feed.”