Theron said, bitterly.

Perpetua came up to him and touched him on the arm. "Father," she said.
"You did not tell me that there was a new king in Sicily."

The executioner looked down upon his daughter's face with a smile of
grim pity. Putting his arm around her shoulders, he led her to the
fallen column, and they sat there side by side.

[Illustration: PERPETUA]

"Ill news comes too soon, whenever it comes," he said. "I had hoped
against hope for so long. I never told you that our good King had a son,
the pride and anguish of his life, the beautiful youth for whose
restoration to health yonder church was set on the highest pinnacle of
these mountains. Sometimes we get our wish and find it a weapon that
wounds our flesh. 'Any price,' King Robert prayed--'any price for my
son's life.' And life came back to the dying child, but it seemed like a
new life, selfish and vain and cruel. Weary of his father's simple rule
and quiet court, he went oversea to his duchy of Naples and lived there
an evil life. The King's ministers tried to keep knowledge of this from
the good King's ears, but such news flies in through the chinks of
palace doors. Still he did not know the worst, and to the day of his
sudden death he hoped that his heir might yet prove worthy to wear the
crown of Sicily. How vain that hope was Sicily now knows."

Theron was silent, staring sullenly at the ground. Perpetua plucked
softly at his sleeve.

"Why did you never tell me this?" she whispered.

Theron shook his head.

"Dear child, for the sake of your mother's memory, who died to give you
life, you have lived here in the holy woods away from an unholy world.
As a man shelters a little, flickering flame, hollowing his hands around
it to keep it from the wind, as a man screens a flower from the cold, so
I have striven to shelter and to screen your life, so that you might
come to womanhood in such a fashion--so simple, so pure, so holy--as
that in which girls grew to womanhood in the Golden Age. Therefore I did
not tell you that Robert the Good was dead; therefore I did not tell you
that this Italianate Prince of Naples reigned in his stead. So much you
have learned from a stranger, but you shall learn no more. Men seldom
come to these windy pinnacles; the King and the King's men and the
King's women never, in all likelihood, again."

The girl listened lovingly to the well-loved voice. "Father," she asked,
"why does the King come to these heights? His f