"Blessed Mary!" she said, "have I indeed tasted the last bitter cup, and is it here where thou reunitest thy votaries after death!--Speak, Hereward! if thou art aught but an empty creature of the imagination!--speak, and tell me, if I have but dreamed of that monstrous ogre!" "Collect thyself, my beloved Bertha," said the Anglo-Saxon, recalled by the sound of her voice, "and prepare to endure what thou livest to witness, and thy Hereward survives to tell. That hideous thing exists--nay, do not start, and look for a hiding-place--thy own gentle hand with a riding rod is sufficient to tame its courage. And am I not here, Bertha? Wouldst thou wish another safeguard?" "No--no," exclaimed she, seizing on the arm of her recovered lover. "Do I not know you now?" "And is it but now you know me, Bertha?" said Hereward. "I suspected before," she said, casting down her eyes; "but I know with certainty that mark of the boar's tusk." Hereward suffered her imagination to clear itself from the shock it had received so suddenly, before he ventured to enter upon present events, in which there was so much both to doubt and to fear. He permitted her, therefore, to recall to her memory all the circumstances of the rousing the hideous animal, assisted by the tribes of both their fathers. She mentioned in broken words the flight of arrows discharged against the boar by young and old, male and female, and how her own well aimed, but feeble shaft, wounded him sharply; she forgot not how, incensed at the pain, the creature rushed upon her as the cause, laid her palfrey dead upon the spot, and would soon have slain her, had not Hereward, when every attempt failed to bring his horse up to the monster, thrown himself from his seat, and interposed personally between the boar and Bertha. The battle was not decided without a desperate struggle; the boar was slain, but Hereward received the deep gash upon his brow which she whom he had saved how recalled to her memory. "Alas!" she said, "what have we been to each other since that period? and what are we now, in this foreign land?" "Answer for thyself, my Bertha," said the Varangian, "if thou canst;--and if thou canst with truth say that thou art the same Bertha who vowed affection to Hereward, believe me, it were sinful to suppose that the saints have brought us together with a view of our being afterwards separated." "Hereward," said Bertha, "you have not preserved the bird in your bosom safer than I have; at home or abroad, in servitude or in freedom, amidst sorrow or joy, plenty or want, my thought was always on the troth I had plighted to Hereward at the stone of Odin." "Say no more of that," said Hereward; "it was an impious rite, and good could not come of it." "Was it then so impious?" she said, the unbidden tear rushing into her large blue eyes.--"Alas! it was a pleasure to reflect that Hereward was mine by that solemn engagement!"