further, he was about to retrace his steps when his attention was
arrested by the appearance of two women. They came out of a house,
and one, the taller of the two, went up to a group of men standing
near, while the other, who looked like a peasant's wife, hung
behind. The look of the first figure caught Estein's eye at once,
and he felt his heart suddenly beat quickly. He could only see her
back as she talked with the men, but every gesture she made,
slight though they were, brought sharply and clearly before his
mind memories of the Holy Isle.

"By the hammer of Thor and the horse of Odin, this country is
surely bewitched," he muttered. His fancy, he told himself, was
playing him a pleasant trick: he had seen Osla so continually in
his mind's eye, that this girl, for girl she seemed, shaped
herself after his thoughts. That it could be she he loved, there
in the flesh, was almost laughably impossible; yet as she talked,
apparently with an air of some authority, to the men beside her,
the resemblance became at moments stronger, and then again he
would say to himself, "Nay, that is not like her." As the men
gesticulated and answered her their voices came to him
indistinctly, while hers, strain his hearing as he might, he could
not catch. There seemed to be a dispute about something which the
whole party were engrossed in, when suddenly one man gave a cry
and pointed at Estein. Then he saw that in his curiosity he had
stepped outside the shelter of the wood and stood in a space
between the trees.

At the man's cry they all looked round, and he saw the girl's
face.