“I am glad,” he said.  “Asked you aught of Uldra?”

“I have not spoken of it to her.”

“Is that so?” said Olaf, smiling.  “Now she is likely to have more than common interest in you, for one reason or another.”

Then I said frankly, knowing what he meant: 

“And I in her.  That is partly the reason why I must go with Wulfnoth and Godwine westward.  And the rest of the reason is this, that I would be near Eadmund.  And maybe if I looked to find more reason yet it would be to leave Sexberga to work out matters without having me to fall back on when Eldred is to be made jealous.”

Thereat Olaf laughed long.

“You have had an ill time with the womenfolk of late,” he said, and it was true enough.

“I have,” said I, “and I am tired thereof.  I shall be glad to be where byrnies and swords are more common than kirtles and distaffs.”

Yet in my mind I knew that I should not leave Uldra with much cheerfulness.  Such companionship as ours had been, strange and full of peril, was a closer bond than even the care of me that had made me think twice or more about Sexberga.  Thoughts of her came lightly in idleness, but when I thought of Uldra, there was comradeship that had borne the strain of peril.

Now I knew well what that comradeship might easily ripen into, and maybe, because I knew it, what I would not allow had begun.  But Uldra had never given me any reason to think that this was so with her.

Olaf said that maybe I was right, and after that we talked of his doings, wondering now when we should meet again, for we were going different ways.  Our parting was not as it had been before, when we knew that sooner or later we should forgather in one place or the other.

“I think, my cousin,” he said, “that the time will soon come when I shall head north again for Norway, and I long for the sign that I must go.  I am going to sail now towards Jerusalem Land, that I may at least try to see the Holy Places before I die.  It may be that I shall reach that land, and it may be not, but when the sign comes I must turn back and go to fight the last fight that shall be between Christian and heathen in our country.”

So he said to me before his ship sailed with the morning tide.  And I had no words in which to answer him, for his going seemed to leave me friendless again, so much had we been at one together.  Almost had I taken up that journey to the Holy Land with him, but I thought that if it was a good and pious thins to go on that pilgrimage for myself, it was even more so to bide for the sake of king and country here in the land that should be holy for all of us who are English.  And when I said that to Olaf, he smiled brightly and answered: 

“If old Norway called for me, I would say the same.  You are right.”

Thus we parted, and I watched his sails fade and sink into the rim of the southern sea, and then rode back to Relf feeling as if the time to come had little brightness for me.