She answered for herself, the girl in the bondmaid’s kirtle, as she stopped before them; and in voice as well as face she was Brynhild, the Jarl’s sister.
“I should have thought there was more risk of a man’s forgetting anything than his wedding-day,” she said with lips that smiled through trembling.
Even then he dared not believe it, but stood gazing from her to the pair of saddled horses tethered in the shelter of a spreading tree. Drawing yet nearer, she held out her hands, her gray eyes meeting his as steadfast as the gray North star.
“It means,” she said, “that even as Freya followed Rolf, your wife follows you into banishment—Love, what is it?”
For he had flung himself on his knees before her and was kissing the hem of her coarse robe.
XXIII
“Once must every man die”
—Northern saying.
It was a radiant earth that kindled into color with the coming of the light. Dipping from a hill-top into a little valley abrim with the yellow of hickory buds and the new green of maples and the red-and-pink of budding oak leaves, the girl on the roan horse spoke dreamily: