The Ward of King Canute (Dodo Press)

Ottilie / Ottilia Adelina Liljencrantz (1876-1910) was the author of The Thrall of Leif the Lucky (1902), The Ward of King Canute (1903), Vinland Champions (1904) and Viking's Love and Other Tales of the North (1911). "As the blackness of the midsummer night paled, the broken towers and wrecked walls of the monastery loomed up dim and stark in the gray light. The longdrawn sigh of a waking world crept through the air and rustled the ivy leaves. The pitying angel of dreams, who had striven all night long to restore the plundered shrine and raise from their graves the band of martyred nuns, ceased from his ministrations, softly as a bubble frees itself from the pipe that shaped it, and floated away on the breath of the wind. Through a breach in the moss-grown wall, the first sunbeam stole in and pointed a bright finger across the cloister garth at the charred spot in the centre, where missals and parchment rolls had made a roaring fire to warm the invaders' blood-stained hands."