through the nearer glades, the hares and conies stealing forth to
sport or to feed; or the bat wheeling low, in chase of the forest
moth. From the thickest part of the copse came a slow human foot, and
Hilda, emerging, paused by the waters of the pool. That serene and
stony calm habitual to her features was gone; sorrow and passion had
seized the soul of the Vala, in the midst of its fancied security from
the troubles it presumed to foresee for others. The lines of the face
were deep and care-worn--age had come on with rapid strides--and the
light of the eye was vague and unsettled, as if the lofty reason
shook, terrified in its pride, at last.

"Alone, alone!" she murmured, half aloud: "yea, evermore alone! And
the grandchild I had reared to be the mother of kings--whose fate,
from the cradle, seemed linked with royalty and love--in whom,
watching and hoping for, in whom, loving and heeding, methought I
lived again the sweet human life--hath gone from my hearth--forsaken,
broken-hearted--withering down to the grave under the shade of the
barren cloister! Is mine heart, then, all a lie? Are the gods who
led Odin from the Scythian East but the juggling fiends whom the
craven Christian abhors? Lo! the Wine Month has come; a few nights
more, and the sun which all prophecy foretold should go down on the
union of the icing and the maid, shall bring round the appointed day:
yet Aldyth still lives, and Edith still withers; and War stands side
by side with the Church, between the betrothed and the altar. Verily,
verily, my spirit hath lost its power, and leaves me bowed, in the awe
of night, a feeble, aged, hopeless, childless woman!"

Tears of human weakness rolled down the Vala's cheeks. At that
moment, a laugh came from a thing that had seemed like the fallen
trunk of a tree, or a trough in which the herdsman waters his cattle,