"Vandrad, father?" she said gently. "He has been gone these eight
months. Did you not know?"

The hermit seemed hardly to comprehend her words.

"Gone!" he repeated. "Why did you not tell me?"

"Surely you knew," she said.

"Why went he away? I would hear him sing. He used to sing to me of
war. He sang last night. Last night," he repeated doubtfully;
"methinks it was last night. Bring him to me."

She turned his questions as best she could, and strove to make him
think of other things. With her arm through his they paced the
turf along the shore, and all the while her heart sank lower and
lower. She was in the presence of something so mysterious that
even wise men in those days shrank from it in fear. It was the
finger of God alone, they said, that laid a blight on human minds,
and there before her was His handiwork.

Yet, had she but known it, this blight had been the slow work of
years. Her father's mind, always dark and superstitious, and
tinged with morbid melancholy, had gradually in these long
solitary years given way more and more before sombre underminings,
till now, with old age at the gates, it had at last succumbed.
Some few bright moments there were at rare intervals, but in all
the months that followed it was but the shattered hull of Thord
the Tall, once the terror of the western seas, that lingered on
the Holy Isle.