th the narrow life of Thorney, its
petty din and traffic, fallen away from him and forgotten utterly.
Always his wandering ended in a garden, whose every path of dusky green
he knew by heart, where one waited for him in the still evening light.
In the flesh he lived with Nicodemus and Myleia, letting himself be
waited on, worried over, caressed, to their affectionate hearts'
content. No mood of his was too wayward for their sympathy; when at
nightfall, after long hours of brooding, he would chant strange tales by
some crowded camp-fire, than theirs were no voices quicker in wonder and
applause. That they understood not half of what he said mattered nothing
to their fondness; yet to Nicanor it was this one thing which mattered
all. Nor were they the only ones who listened and loved his words. Many
a fretting soul he lulled to quiet by his magic; to many he gave
pleasure whose pleasures were all too few. Once he had scorned them,
these simple children of plain and forest, whose emotions he could mould
as a potter moulds his clay; in his high pride he had thought that these
were not the worlds he was born to conquer. Now he loved them; to bring
a moment's brightness into some gray life, a moment's forgetfulness of
pain to one who suffered--this it was his to do. For, as once he had
thought to move the hearts of kings with his power, so now he knew that
a king's heart is no more than man's heart, and only he may move the one
who can move the other. And every heart that he won he laid in spirit at
the feet of his lost lady, who had taught him the Master-word of the
tongue of men and angels, without which faith and hope can profit
nothing, nor can any heart be won.

A thicket of briars and underbrush hid him from the road. For drowsy
hours he had looked through his tangled lattice upon the life that went
up and down the highway, himself unseen,--a pedler, bent under the
weight of the pack upon his shoulders, making wry faces at his blistered
feet; a farmer, mounted on his clumsy two-wheeled cart, returning from
the markets of Londinium; a chariot, gay with paint and gilding, with
two young nobles arguing over the races at Uriconium; and between all
these, long intervals of sun-steeped stillness, when the world drowsed
and insects shrilled in the untrod grasses.

Later there came northward toward Londinium a funeral train, on the way
to the cemeteries that lined the road outside the town, weaving in and
out among the checkere