He spoke but with the matter-of-factness of a soldier reconnoitring a position, but on the girl in the page’s dress the words fell like blows. Then it was that she realized for the first time how ill a crumb can satisfy the hunger which asks for a loaf; that she knew that her body was not the only part of her which was starving. Somewhere on that dark stairway she lost the boyishness out of her nature forever. The thin cheeks were white under their tan when they came again into the light of the guard-room fire; and the blue eyes had in them a woman’s reproach.
“It would show no more than friendship if you said that you were sorry to have me go,” she told him with quivering lips. “Are you so eager in getting me off that you cannot say you will miss me?”
But the young lord only laughed good-humoredly as he poured the wine. “What a child you are! Do you not know those things without my telling you? And as for missing you, I am not likely to have time. The first chance you get, you will slip back to me if you do not, I will come after you and flog you into the bargain; be there no forgetting!”
She could not laugh as she would once have done; instead she choked in the cup and pushed it from her. A passionate yearning came over her for one such word, one such look, as he would give the dream-lady when she should come. With her secret on her lips, she lifted her eyes to his.
A little amused but more pitying, and withal very, very kind, his glance met hers; and her courage forsook her. Suppose the word she was about to speak should not make his face friendlier? Suppose his surprise should be succeeded by haughtiness, or, worse than all, by a touch of that gay scorn? Even at the memory of it she shrank. Better a crumb than no bread at all. Turning away, she followed him in silence down the dark passage.
When the moment of parting arrived, and Sebert’s hand lay on the last bolt, that mood was so strong upon her that it seemed to her as though she were passing out of life into death. Clinging to his cloak, with her face buried in its folds, she wet it with far bitterer tears than any she had shed over her murdered kinsmen.
“I wish I had not thought of it! I wish I had not told you!” she sobbed into the soft muffling. “Only to be near you I thought heaven; and now the Fates have cheated me even out of that.”
The Etheling put his hand under the bent head to raise it that he might hear what the lips were saying, and she covered his palm with kisses. Then slipping away, like the elf he had called her, she glided through the narrow space of the half-open door and was gone, sobbing, out into the night.
CHAPTER XV. How Fridtjof Cheated The Jotun
“‘Such is the love of women,
Who falsehood meditate,
As if one drove not rough-shod
On slippery ice
A spirited two-year-old
And unbroken horse.
Hávamál.