She turned to her work, and I went out across the courtyard.  Already the wains stood there, the teams of sleepy oxen tossing their long horns in the glare of torches.  The church bell was clanging the alarm of fire to bring home the men from field or forest if any were abroad so late, for it was an hour after sunset, and there was no moon yet.

The gray horse that my father gave me a year agone stood ready saddled in the stall when I came to the stables.  I went and loosed him, while a groom saw me and ran to help, and as I swung into the saddle I saw his face marked with new lines across his forehead.

“Do you fly first, master?” he said, with strange meaning in his voice.

“I go to Wormingford,” I answered.  “Likely enough, therefore, that I fly last,” and I laughed.

“Aye, let me go, master, let me go,” he said.  “It is like that the Danes are on the road.”

“Not yet,” I said, touched by question and offer alike.  “There is many a mile between here and Ipswich, and I think that to go to Wormingford is my work, surely.”

So I rode away fast, seeing in the valley below me the lights of the house that I sought.  As I had said, the errand was indeed mine.

For at the great house just across the river below the hills lived the one who should be my wife in the days to come—­Hertha, daughter of Osgod, the Thane of Wormingford.  It was now three years since we had been betrothed with all solemnity in our church, and that had seemed but fit and right, for we were two children who had played together since we could run hand in hand.  And my mother had been as a mother also to little Hertha since she was left with only her father to tend her.

Our house and Osgod’s were akin, though not near, for we both traced our line from Redwald the first Christian king of East Anglia, whose name I bore.  Hertha was two years younger than I.

Now Osgod the Thane had ridden away to the war with my father, and unless he had returned with Grinkel, Hertha was alone in the house with her old nurse and the farm servants.  Most surely she would have been at Bures with us but for some spring-time sickness which was among the village children, and from which my mother sought to keep her free.  It might be that the thane had returned, but it was in my mind that the manner of Grinkel’s coming boded ill to all of us.

So I rode on quickly down the hill towards the river.  I knew not how near the Danes might be, but I thought little of them, until suddenly through the dusk I saw a red point of fire flicker and broaden out into flame on a hilltop eastward, where I knew a beacon fire was piled against need.  And then from every point along the Stour valley beacon after beacon flashed out in answer, until all the countryside was full of them; and I hurried on more swiftly than before.

Our hall stood on the hill crest above church and village, beyond the reach of creeping river mist and sudden floods, and I rode down the track that crosses the lower road and so comes to the ford below Osgod’s place on the Essex side of the river.  And when I came to the crossing my horse pricked his ears and snorted, so that I knew there were horsemen about, and I reined up and waited in the lane.