He straightened abruptly and waved them away.

“What more is there to do about it?” he added.  “This fellow has been punished, and Kark has got one of the many knocks his insolence deserves.  Let us end this talk,—­only see to it that they do not kill each other.  I do not wish to lose any more property.”  He motioned them off, and turned back to Tyrker.

But there was more to it.  Something,—­Leif’s curtness, or the touch of Valbrand’s hand upon his naked shoulder,—­roused Alwin’s madness afresh.  Shaking off the hand, fighting it off, he bearded the chief himself.

“I will kill him if ever he utters his cur’s yelp at me again.  You are blind and simple to think to keep an earl-born man under the feet of a churl.  You are a fool to keep an accomplished man at work that any simpleton might do.  I will not bear with your folly.  I will slay the hound the first chance I get.”  He ended breathless and trembling with passion.

Valbrand stood aghast.  Leif’s brows drew down so low that nothing but two fiery sparks showed of his eyes.  Through Alwin went the same thrill he had felt when the trader’s sword-point pricked his breast.

Yet the lightning did not strike.  Alwin glanced up, amazed.  While he stared, a subtle change crept over the chief.  Slowly he ceased to be the grim curt Viking:  slowly he became the nobleman whose stateliness minstrels celebrated in their songs, and the King spoke of with praise.  A stillness seemed to gather round them.  Alwin felt his anger cooling and sinking within him.

After a time, Leif said with the calmness of perfect superiority:  “It may be that I have not treated you as honorably as you deserve.  Yet what am I to think of these words of yours?  Is it after such fashion that a jarl-born man with accomplishments addresses his lord in your country?”

To the blunt old steersman, to the ox-like Olver, to the half-dozen others who heard it, the change was incomprehensible.  They stared at their master, then at each other, and finally gave it up as a whim past their understanding.  It may be that Leif was curious to see whether it would be incomprehensible to Alwin as well.  He sat watching him intently.

Alwin’s eyes fell before his master’s.  The stately quietness, the noble forbearance, were like voices out of his past.  They called up memories of his princess-mother, of her training, of the dignity that had always surrounded her.  Suddenly he saw, as for the first time, the roughness and coarseness of the life about him, and realized how it had roughened and coarsened him.  A dull red mounted to his face.  Slowly, like one groping for a half forgotten habit, he bent his knee before the offended chief.  Unconsciously, for the first time in his thraldom, he gave to a Northman the title a Saxon uses to his superior.

“Lord, you are right to think me unmannerly.  I was mad with anger so that I did not weigh my words.  I will say nothing against it if you treat me like a churl.”