“So the voice ceased, and the angel was gone, and when I looked up there was naught but the growing dawn across yon window, and the voice of the thrush that sings outside.”

Now the old nurse pondered over the dream for a while without speaking, for she could not see what it might mean at first.

But at last she said, “It is a good dream surely, because of the angel that spoke; but there seems only one way in which it can come to pass.  A prince must come for you from Denmark, for there he would reign by his own right, and here he would do so by yours.  Yet I have heard that the Danish kings are most terrible heathen, worse than the Saxon kin, of whom we know the worst now.  Maybe that is why the angel told you to have no fear.  I mind Gunnar Kirkeban, and what he wrought on the churches and Christian folk in Wales—­in Gower on the Severn Sea, and on the holy Dee—­when I was young.”

For both Goldberga and this old nurse of hers were Christian, as had been Orwenna, Ethelwald’s wife, her mother.  It had been a great day for them when the King of Kent had brought over his fair wife, Bertha, from France, for she, too, was Christian, and had restored the ancient church in the very castle where Goldberga was kept.

Now the princess went to sleep again, and woke refreshed; but all day long the memory of the dream and of him whom she saw in it bided with her, until it was time for her to go to the great hall for the feast of the Witan.

Now it happened that on this night I must be one of the two housecarls who should stand, torch in hand, behind the king.  It was a place that none of the men cared for much, since they saw their comrades feasting at the end of the room, while they must bide hungry till the end, and mind that no sparks from the flaring pine fell on the guests, moreover.  Eglaf would have excused me this had I wished; but I would take my turn with the rest, and maybe did not mind losing the best of the feast so much as the others.  There were some three hundred guests at that feast, and it was a wondrous fair sight to me as I stood on the high place and saw them gather.  The long table behind which I was ran right across the dais, rich with gold and silver and glass work:  and below this, all down the hall, ran long tables again, set lengthwise, that none might have their backs to the king.  And at the end of the hall, crosswise, were the tables for the housecarls, and the men of the house, and of the thanes who were guests.  And as the housecarls came in they hung their shields and weapons on the walls in order, so that they flashed bright from above the hangings that Berthun and his men had set up afresh and more gaily than I had seen yet in this place.