I remembered my confirmation at the good bishop's hands more plainly than that, for well I knew what I took on me at that time.
But the knowledge of what our betrothal meant would have grown up in our hearts had peace lasted.

There had been none to mind me of it, or of her, and warfare fills up the whole mind of a man.

I was brought up amid the scenes of camp and march and battle just at that time when a boy's mind is ready to be filled with aught, and, as he learns, the past slips away, for his real life has begun.
And these were strange days through which I had been.

We grew old quickly amid all the cruel trouble of the hopeless fighting.

As David, the holy king, grew from boy to man suddenly in his days, which seem so like ours when one hears them read of in Holy Writ, so it had been with Olaf--with Eadmund and Eadward his brother--so it would be with Cnut, and so it was with myself.