“Nay,” replied Freydisa, “since I can show you the door of the grave, and perchance the passage still stands.  Yet, will you really enter there?”

“Why not, Freydisa?  Must I bear to be taunted by the woman I am to wed?  Surely it would be better to die and have done.  Let the ghost slay me if he will.  It comes upon me that if so I shall be spared trouble.”

“No bridegroom’s talk,” said Freydisa, “however true it may be.  Yet, young Olaf, do you take heart, since I think that this ghost has no desire for your blood.  I am wise in my own fashion, Olaf, and much of the past comes to me, if little of the future, and I believe that this Wanderer and you have more to do with each other than we can guess.  It may be even that this task is appointed to you and that all these happenings, which are but begun, work to an end unseen.  At the least, try your fortune, and if you die—­why, I who was your nurse from your mother’s knee, love you well enough to die with you.  Together we’ll descend to Hela’s halls, there to seek out the Wanderer and learn his story.”

Then, throwing her arms about my neck, she drew me to her and kissed me on the brow.

“I was not your mother, Olaf,” she went on, “but, to be honest, I would have been could I have had my fancy though, strangely enough, I never felt thus towards Ragnar, your brother.  Now, why do you make me talk foolishness?  Come hither, and I will show you the entrance to the grave; it is where the sun first strikes upon it.”

Then she led me to the east of the mound, where, not more than eight or ten feet from its base, grew a patch of bushes.  Among these bushes was a little hollow, as though at this spot the earth had sunk in.  Here, at her bidding, I began to dig, and with her help worked for the half of an hour or more in silence, till at length my spade struck against a stone.

“It is the door-stone,” said Freydisa.  “Dig round it.”

So I dug till I made a hole at the edge of the stone large enough for a man to creep through.  After this we paused to rest a while and to allow the air within the mound to purify.

“Now,” she said, “if you are not afraid, we will enter.”

“I am afraid,” I answered.  Indeed, the terror which struck me then returns, so that even as I write I feel fear of the dead man who lay, and for aught I know still lies, within that grave.  “Yet,” I added, “never will I face Iduna more without the necklace, if it can be found.”

So we struck sparks on to the tinder, and from them lit the two lamps of seal oil.  Then I crept into the hole, Freydisa following me, to find myself in a narrow passage built of rough stones and roofed with flat slabs of water-worn rock.  This tunnel, save for a little dry soil that had sifted into it through the cracks between the stones, was quite clear.  We crawled along it without difficulty till we came to the tomb chamber, which was in the centre of the