CHAPTER II.
At dawn, Harold woke from uneasy and broken slumbers, and his eyes fell upon the face of Hilda, large, and fair, and unutterably calm, as the face of Egyptian sphinx.
"Have thy dreams been prophetic, son of Godwin ?" said the Vala.
"Our Lord forfend," replied the Earl, with unusual devoutness.
"Tell them, and let me read the rede; sense dwells in the voices of the night." Harold mused, and after a short pause, he said: "Methinks, Hilda, I can myself explain how those dreams came to haunt me." Then raising himself on his elbow, he continued, while he fixed his clear penetrating eyes upon his hostess: "Tell me frankly, Hilda, didst thou not cause some light to shine on yonder knoll, by the mound and stone, within the temple of the Druids ?" But if Harold had suspected himself to be the dupe of some imposture, the thought vanished when he saw the look of keen interest, even of awe, which Hilda's face instantly assumed.
"Didst thou see a light, son of Godwin, by the altar of Thor, and over the bautastein of the mighty dead?
a flame, lambent and livid, like moonbeams collected over snow ?" "So seemed to me the light." "No human hand ever kindled that flame, which announces the presence of the Dead," said Hilda, with a tremulous voice; "though seldom, uncompelled by the seid and the rune, does the spectre itself warn the eyes of the living." "What shape, or what shadow of shape, does that spectre assume ?" "It rises in the midst of the flame, pale as the mist on the mountain, and vast as the giants of old; with the saex, and the spear, and the shield, of the sons of Woden .-- Thou hast seen the Scin-laeca," continued Hilda, looking full on the face of the Earl.
"If thou deceivest me not," began Harold, doubting still.
"Deceive thee! not to save the crown of the Saxon dare I mock the might of the dead.

Knowest thou not--or hath thy vain lore stood in place of the lore of thy fathers--that where a hero of old is buried, his treasures lie in his grave; that over that grave is at times seen at night the flame that thou sawest, and the dead in his image of air?
Oft seen in the days that are gone, when the dead and the living had one faith--were one race; now never marked, but for portent, and prophecy, and doom:--glory or woe to the eyes that see! On yon knoll, Aesc (the first-born of Cerdic, that Father-King of the Saxons,) has his grave where the mound rises green, and the stone gleams wan by the altar of Thor.

He smote the Britons in their temple, and he fell smiting.

They buried him in his arms, and with the treasures his right hand had won.
Fate hangs on the house of Cerdic, or the realm of the Saxon, when Woden calls the laeca of his son from the grave." Hilda, much troubled bent her face over her clasped hands, and, rocking to and fro, muttered some runes unintelligible to the ear of her listener.

Then she turned to him, commandingly, and said: "Thy dreams now, indeed, are oracles, more true than living Vala could charm with the wand and the rune: Unfold them." Thus adjured, Harold resumed: "Methought, then, that I was on a broad, level plain, in the noon of day; all was clear to my eye, and glad to my heart.