Page:The North Star (1904).djvu/36

18 a goddess, she seemed, with deep sea eyes and hair like the gloss of the dark beaver when he rises shining from the waves. Pink as the hawthorn blossom was her skin. She was tall and moved like, the old scalds tell us, Brunhilda or the Alruna maidens, when they went to meet a warrior returning from victory. I stood still to watch her, the while my heart danced with very joy at her beauty. I thought of my viking ship, and how we might go over the water together, of how her blue eyes would look down into the waves and make them bluer. It seemed as if she glanced at me, but mayhaps I only thought so; and I gazed upon her as long as I could see one gleam of her purple robe and her long mantle of purple and yellow.”

“Of purple and yellow?” sharply repeated Eogan, starting at the words.

“Even so. As purple as the hills of Norway at sunset, and its stripes as yellow as the wheat fields of the Trondelag at noon-day.”

“A princess, she was,” said Eogan, “for none but a king’s daughter may wear such a robe and such a mantle. She might have been even the very—”

A blast of trumpets drowned the words that finished the sentence. Eogan forgot, as he remembered the meaning of the sound, the sudden jealousy that had risen as he listened to the Norseman.

“There she stands, my son,” said Fergus O’Niall.

No need to tell Eogan. Every quick throb of his