Still like the bright-eyed bird on the wall, Eric cocked his handsome little head knowingly; but even as they waited in laughing expectation, Olaf the French came cantering around the bend, and Eric’s censure gave way to eulogy as he turned and recognized the new-comer.
“I will tell you a man I have got admiration for, and that is the one who comes riding hither! When I have my growth, I shall be as near like him as possible; and I am going to France with him whenever he goes back,—am I not, Olaf?”
“So it shall be,” Thorgrim’s son assented benignly, as he returned with inimitable grace the rather careless greetings of the group.
Importance swelled in Eric’s chest until it burst out of his lips as ecstatically as the red-breasted bird’s song.
“That will be the finest part of my life! I shall wipe this little town of cabins off my mind as completely as I have wiped off that old Tower,—and that is as much gone from remembrance as though it had never been. Do you know, masters, it looks to me sometimes as though I could never have been born there? What seems likeliest is that some great chief of Norumbega had one child too many, so that he gave it to thralls to carry into the forest; and then Erna came along and found it and called it hers, so much nobler is my nature than my moth—” He left the word unfinished as his rapt gaze came down for the first time to the Songsmith, where he had risen and stood beside Gunnar the Merry. “By that I do not mean that she is not a worthy woman,” he added hastily.
His foster-brother answered not a word. Stepping to the head of Eric’s horse, he said briefly:
“Get down.”
It did not appear that the page liked the tone overmuch, but neither did he seem willing to trifle with it. He made a parade of stretching in his saddle.
“You need not say it as though I meant to keep on,” he retorted. “I have been waiting until you came, as every one here knows, to get down and talk to you.” Slowly he dismounted, taking great pains to keep his bright spurs out of the puddles.
“Give me now that chain off your neck, as a gift for your sister.”