While the boat hastened back to bring off the rest of the unfortunates, those of the first load whom wine and hope had sufficiently revived, explained the disaster.

The wrecked ship belonged to Thorir of Trondhjem; and that merchant and his wife Gudrid and fourteen sailors made up her company.  On the voyage from Nidaros to Greenland with a cargo of timber, their vessel had gone to pieces on a submerged reef, and they had been just able to reach that most inhospitable of rocks and cling there like flies, frozen, wind-battered, and drenched.  The waves, in a moment of repentance, had thrown a little of their timber back to them, and this had been their only shelter; and their only food some coarse lichens and a few sea-birds’ eggs.

It was little wonder that when Leif had brought the last load on board, and drowned their past woes in present comforts, the starved creatures were almost ready to embrace his knees with thankfulness.

“It seems to me that we should be called ‘the Lucky,’ and you ’the Good,’” Thorir said, as the two chiefs stood on the forecastle, watching the anchor and the sail both rising with joyful alacrity.  “Without your aid, we could not have lived a day longer.”

And Gudrid, opening her eyes to see Helga’s fair face bending over her to put a wine cup to her lips, murmured faintly, “A Valkyria could not look more beautiful to me than you do.  Tell me what you are called, that I may know what name to love you by.”

“I am called Helga, Gilli’s daughter,” the shield-maiden answered, with just an edge of bitterness on the last words.

Gudrid’s gentle eyes opened wide with wonder and alarm.

“Not Helga the Fair of Trondhjem,” she gasped, “who fled from Gilli to his kinsfolk in Greenland?  Alas, my unfortunate child!”

In the eagerness in which she clasped her hands, the wine-cup fell clanging from Helga’s hold.  “Is he dead?” she cried, imploringly.  “Only tell me that, and I will serve you all the rest of my life!  Is Gilli dead?”

But Gudrid had sunk back in another faint.  She lay with her eyes closed, moaning and murmuring to herself.

Leif, biting sharply at his thick mustache, as he was wont to do when excited, turned sharply on Thorir.

“What is the reason of this?” he demanded.  “What are these tidings concerning my kinswoman, which your wife hesitates to speak?  Is Gilli of Trondhjem dead?”

Thorir answered with great haste and politeness, “No, no; naught so bad as that.  Naught but what I expect can be easily remedied.  But it appears that when Gilli attempted to follow his daughter to Greenland, last fall, he suffered a shipwreck and the loss of much valuable property, barely escaping with his life.  From this he drew the rash conclusion that his daughter had become a misfortune to him, as some foreknowing woman had once said she would.  And he declared that since the maiden preferred her poorer kinsfolk in Greenland, she might stay with them; and—­”