valley were thronged with men bathing gaping wounds and tearing up the cool
moss to staunch their flowing blood. Never had the girl dreamed of such chaos.
It gave her the feeling of having plunged into a whirlpool. She threaded her
way among the groups as silently as the leaf-padded ground would permit.

She had come in by the back door, but now she began to reach the better
quarters. Her nose reported sooner than her eyes that a meal was in making;
and a glow of anticipation braced her famished body. Here, in this green
alcove, preparations were just beginning; a white-robed slave knelt by the
curling thread of smoke and nursed the flickering flame with his breath, while
his circle of hungry masters pelted him with woolly beech-nuts and cursed his
slowness. There, a dozen yards to the left, the meal was nearly over; between
the gnarled trunks the fire shone like a red eye; and bursts of merriment and
snatches of boisterous song marked the beginning of the drinking.

Sometimes a woman's lighter laughter would mingle with the peal. Sometimes,
through the sway-ing branches, Randalin caught sight of the flower-fair face
of an English girl, bending between the shaggy yellow heads of the captors.
Once she came upon a brawny Viking employing his huge fingers to twine a
golden chain around a white throat. The girl's face was dimpling bewitchingly
as she held aside her shining hair. Randalin had an impulse of triumph.

"I wish that Sister Wynfreda could see that, now, since it is her belief that
Danes are always overbearing toward their captives," she told herself. "This
one has no appearance of having felt blows or known hard labor. She could not
have been entertained with greater liberality in her father's house--"

She broke off suddenly, as the words suggested a new train of thought. This
girl must have been driven from her father's house by Danes, even as she
herself had been driven forth by the English. Yet here was she eating with her