.

HOW QUENDRITHA THE QUEEN HAD HER WILL.
Slowly the footfalls of our comrades died away down the low passage, and then the last flicker of their torch passed from the stone walls of that terrible pit, leaving Selred and myself alone in the cold moonlight.

Out through the doors toward the council chamber I saw the Mercian thane, who had been watching us in silence, sit down at the table and set his head in his hands wearily; and I heard Erling try the bars of the door to the guest hall, and finding it impossible to open, after a while pass into the council chamber, and set himself against the great door once more.
After that there fell a dead silence over all the place, and it was uncanny.

It seemed impossible that all men should sleep in peace in the palace where such a deed had been wrought at our feet.

I had rather the rush and yell of the Welsh over these ramparts they hated than this stillness of coldly-planned treachery.
Nor should I have been surprised if at any moment I had heard the tramp of men who came to fall on us and end what had been begun, or the cries and din of arms which should tell that they had fallen on the sleeping thanes of Anglia in the guest hall.