“It is open to my sight at last!” he muttered over and over, as he hurried through the darkness toward the lighted booths.  “Heaven be thanked, it is open to my sight at last!”

As he reached the end of the largest hut and was turning the corner in eager haste, an arm reached quickly out of the shadow and touched his cloak.  Instinctively his hand went to his knife; but it fell away the next instant in a very different gesture, as Helga’s voice whispered in his ear: 

“Alwin,—­it is I!  I have waited for you since the first noise of the landing.  I have a—­hush, you must not do that!  I have need of my lips to speak with No, no!  Listen; I wish to warn you—­”

“And I must tell you what has just occurred.”  Alwin’s excitement bore down her caution.  “I have guessed the riddle of what my service is to be,—­or, to tell it truthfully, luck has guessed it for me, owl that I am!  Here has it—­”

But Helga’s hand fell softly over his mouth.  “Dumb as well as blind shall you be, till I have finished!  Already I have stayed out long enough to excite suspicion.  Listen to my warning; Kark suspects that your complexion is shallow.  Yesterday I overheard him put the question to Tyrker, whether or not it were possible that a paint could color a man’s skin dark so that it would not wear off.”

“Devil take the—­”

“Hush, that is not all!  I have never thought it worth while to tell you, in the few words we have had together; but now I know that the creature has suspected us ever since the day when Leif came upon us on the bluff.  The day after that, Kark dared to say to me, ’Is a shield-maiden as fickle as other women, for all her steel shirt?  In Greenland, Helga, Gilli’s daughter, loved an Englishman.’  I beat him soundly for it, yet I could not uproot the thought from his mind; and now—­”

“And now I tell you that it is of no consequence what he thinks,” Alwin interrupted her, eagerly.  “I have to-night found out a means by which I am as certain to win favor as—­”

But he could not finish.  Crackling steps in the grove behind them made Helga spring away from him like a startled bird.  He had only time to whisper after her, “To-night,—­watch me across the fire!” before she had vanished among the shadows, like one of them.

After a moment the young man went his way around the corner of the cabin and came in through the open doorway, where his companions sat at supper.

The hall, which was also the larger of the sleeping-houses, was not an unworthy off-shoot of the splendors of Brattahlid.  Here, as there, the rough walls were lined with gleaming weapons and shields that shone like suns in the ruddy glow of the fire.  And in lieu of tapestries, there was a noble medley of bears’ claws, fish nets, glistening birds’ wings, drying hides, branching antlers, and squirrels’ tails.  The bunk-like beds, built against the walls, displayed a fortune in the skin covers that