“You should have waked me earlier,” I said.  “Now it grows late for our quest.”

“About time to begin it, master,” the Dane said, “if we do not want to run our heads into parties from the palace.  Maybe they will be out also on the same business.  What we seek cannot be far from thence.”

Then we mounted and rode down stream, quickly at first, with a wary eye for any comers, searching the banks for traces of wheels, carelessly for a few miles, and afterward more closely.  But we saw nothing more than old marks.  The track ended, and we climbed the rising ground above the river, and sought it there, found it, and went back to the water, for no cart had newly passed to it here.  And so we went until we were but a mile or two from the palace, and then we were fain to go carefully.

In an hour I was due in the copse to meet Selred, and then men would be gathered in the palace yards in readiness for supper, so that we might have little trouble in being unseen there.  Now, on the other hand, men from the forest and fields might be making their way palaceward for the same reason.

“I would that we could find some place where we might hide the horses for a while,” I said.  “What is that yonder across the river?”

There was some sort of building there, more than half hidden in bushes and trees.  Toward it a little cattle track crossed the water, showing that there was a ford.

“The track passes the walls, and does not go thereto,” said Erling.  “It may be worth while to see if there is a shelter there.”

So across the ford we rode, with the trout flicking in and out among the horses’ hoofs.  The building, whatever it was, stood a hundred yards or more from the river on a little southern slope which had been once terraced carefully.  Over the walls, which were ruinous, the weeds grew rankly, and among them a young tree had found a rooting.  The place had been undisturbed for long years; and I thought that it seemed as if men shunned it as haunted, for of a certainty not a foot had gone within half arrowshot of it this spring.

We stood in the cattle track and looked at it, doubting, for no man cares to pass where others have feared to step for reasons not known.

“It is an uncanny place,” said Erling; “which may be all the better for us.  At any rate, we will go and look into it.  Stay, though; no need to make a plain track to it hence.”

The cattle tracks bent round and about it, and as we followed one it seemed at last to lead straight into the ruin.  So we went with it, and found the entrance to the place.  Last year the cattle had used it for a shelter, but not this, and there were no signs that any man had followed them into it.  And then I knew what the place was, and wondered at its desertion little, for it was a Roman villa.  Any Saxon knows that the old heathen gods those hard folk worshipped still hang about the walls where their images used to hold sway, not now in the fair shapes they feigned for them, but as the devils we know them to have been, horned and hoofed and tailed.  Minding which a fear came on me that the marks we took for those made by harmless kine were of those unearthly footsteps, and I reined back.