Another moment, and it rose bodily from the water, floated upward into the skies, and left all below laughing, clear in the sunlight. There was no sand now to be seen, save a narrow yellow stripe on the edge of the soft verdant points, which stretched out from the shores of Westmoreland, sparkling in the sun and glittering in the rain-drops, into the broad bosom of Morecambe Bay, which was now filled with the tide, though it had not as yet nearly risen to its highest mark--but here and there, at intervals, dark spots showed in the expanse of waters, where the tops of the highest sand-banks were scarcely submerged at all, on which the gentle eddies rippled and sparkled, as wavelet after wavelet rolled in by its own mounting impulse, but hastened by no angry gust or turbulent billow. On one of these sand-banks, having so long escaped, Heaven knows how, quicksands and breakers, and having made his way thus far landward, sat a tall, powerful man-at-arms, sheathed from head to heel in a complete panoply of chain mail. His horse was likewise caparisoned in the heaviest bardings--chamfront and poitrel, steel demipique and bard proper--nothing was wanting of the heaviest caparison with which charger or man ever rode into the tilt-yard or mêlée. The tide was already above the horse's belly, and the rider's plated shoes and mail hose were below the surface. Deep water was around him on every side, the nearest shore a mile distant, and to swim fifty yards, much less a mile, under that weight of steel, was impossible; still he sat there, waiting his doom, silent and impassive. He was the last of the pursuers; he alone of the two parties, who but three short hours before had spurred so fiercely in pursuit of the wretched slave, had escaped the fate of Pharaoh and his host, when the Red Sea closed above them. He alone breathed the breath of life; and he, certain of death, awaited it with that calm composure, which comes to the full as much of artificial training as of innate valor. As the clouds lifted, this solitary man saw, at once, the boat approaching, and saw who rowed it--saw rescue close at hand, yet at the same time saw it impossible. His face had hardly the time to relax into one gleam of hope, before it again settled down into the iron apathy of despair. The coracle swept up abreast of him, then paused, as Eadwulf, half unconsciously, rested on his oars, and gazed into the despairing and blank features of his enemy. It was the seneschal of Waltheofstow, the brother of the man whom he had slain in the forest. Their eyes met, they recognized each other, and each shuddered at the recognition. For a moment, neither spake; but, after a short, bitter pause, it was the rider who broke silence. "So, it is thou, Saxon dog, who alone hast escaped from this destruction!" "It is I, man-hunter. Where are thy boasts and threats now? Why dost not ask the serf, now, for life, for mercy?"