What he had planned would never be known to his daughter now.
It was Rhodo himself who had found his master with head bowed before the
Master of all men.
Before Fleda entered the room she knew what awaited her; a merciful
intuition had blunted the shock to her senses. Yet when she saw the Ry on
his throne of death a moan broke from her lips like that of one who sees
for the last time someone indelibly dear, and turns to face strange paths
with uncertain feet. She did not go to the giant figure seated in the
chair. In what she did there was no panic or hysteria of lacerated heart
and shocked sense; she only sank to her knees in the room a few feet away
from him, and looked at him.
"Father! Oh, Ry! Oh, my Ry!" she whispered in agony and admiration, too,
and kept on whispering.
Fleda had whispered to him in such awe, not only because he was her
father, but because he was so much a man among men, a giant, with a
great, lumbering mind, slow to conceive, but moving in a large,
impressive way when once conception came. To her he had been more than
father; he had been a patriarch, a leader, a viking, capable of the fury
of a Scythian lord, but with the tenderness of a peasant father to his
first child.
"My Ry! My father! Oh, my Ry of Rys!" she kept murmuring to herself.
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