tell; but it has been well said that when Northern blood mingled with English
blood at the time of the Danish Conquest, the Anglo-Saxon race touched the
earth again.




Chapter I

The Fall of the House of Frode

Full stocked folds
I saw at the sons of Fitjung,
Now they carry beggars' staffs;
Wealth is
Like the twinkling of an eye,
The most unstable of friends.
Ha'vama'l.

As the blackness of the midsummer night paled, the broken towers and wrecked
walls of the monastery loomed up dim and stark in the gray light. The long-
drawn sigh of a waking world crept through the air and rustled the ivy leaves.
The pitying angel of dreams, who had striven all night long to restore the
plundered shrine and raise from their graves the band of martyred nuns, ceased
from his ministrations, softly as a bubble frees itself from the pipe that
shaped it, and floated away on the breath of the wind. Through a breach in the
moss-grown wall, the first sunbeam stole in and pointed a bright finger across
the cloister garth at the charred spot in the centre, where missals and
parchment rolls had made a roaring fire to warm the invaders' blood-stained
hands.