So now all that seemed to be on hand was to bring back the towns that were yet held by the Danish garrisons, the thingmen, to their rightful king, and to gather a fleet that would watch the coast against the return of Cnut.  These things seemed not so hard, and our land would surely soon be secure.

Then began to creep into my mind a longing to be back in my own place again at Bures, to see the river and woods that I loved, and to take up the old quiet life that was half forgotten, but none the less sweet to remember after all this war and wearing trouble.  But of all England, after Lindsey, East Anglia was the greatest Danish stronghold for those old reasons that I have spoken of, and it was likely that there would be more fighting there before Ethelred was owned than anywhere else.  So I could not go back yet, but must wait for Earl Ulfkytel and his levies, who would surely make short work of the Danes there when their turn came.  After that my lands would be my own again, and then—­What wonder, after three years and more of warfare and the hard life of a warrior who had no home but in a court which was a camp—­after exile in a strange land—­with my new-found kinship with Olaf the viking—­that what should be then had gone from my mind?  Will any blame the warrior who did but remember his playfellow as part of a long-ago dream of lost peace, if he had forgotten what tie bound him to her?  When I and little Hertha were betrothed it had been nought to us but a pleasant show wherein we had taken foremost parts—­and across the gap of years of trouble so it seemed to me still whenever I recalled it.  I remembered my confirmation at the good bishop’s hands more plainly than that, for well I knew what I took on me at that time.

But the knowledge of what our betrothal meant would have grown up in our hearts had peace lasted.  There had been none to mind me of it, or of her, and warfare fills up the whole mind of a man.  I was brought up amid the scenes of camp and march and battle just at that time when a boy’s mind is ready to be filled with aught, and, as he learns, the past slips away, for his real life has begun.

And these were strange days through which I had been.  We grew old quickly amid all the cruel trouble of the hopeless fighting.  As David, the holy king, grew from boy to man suddenly in his days, which seem so like ours when one hears the= read of in Holy Writ, so it had been with Olaf—­with Eadmund and Eadward his brother—­so it would be with Cnut, and so it was with myself.  I have often spoken with men who were rightly held as veteran warriors, and who yet had seen less warfare in ten years than we saw in those three.  It was endless—­unceasing—­I would have none go through the like.  I know not now how we bore it.

So I had forgotten Hertha, whether there is blame to me or not.  But now, as I say, with the sudden slackening of warfare came to me the longing for rest.  I would fain find my home again and my playmate, and all else that belonged to the past.  But before I could do so there was work to be done, and I was content to look forward and wait.