merciful, and know that I have need to lay aside at least one
comfortable thought against eternity."

"I concede you to have been unwise--" he hoarsely said.

About them fell the dying leaves, of many glorious colors, but the air
of this new day seemed raw and chill.

Then Rosamund came through the opening in the hedge. "Nay, choose,"
she wearily said; "the woman offers life and empery and wealth, and it
may be, even a greater love than I am capable of giving you. I offer a
dishonorable death within the moment."

And again, with that peculiar and imperious gesture, the man flung back
his head, and he laughed. "I am I! and I will so to live that I may
face without shame not only God, but even my own scrutiny." He wheeled
upon the Queen and spoke henceforward very leisurely. "I love you; all
my life long I have loved you, Ysabeau, and even now I love you: and
you, too, dear Rosamund, I love, though with a difference. And every
fibre of my being lusts for the power that you would give me, Ysabeau,
and for the good which I would do with it in the England I or Roger
Mortimer must rule; as every fibre of my being lusts for the man that I
would be could I choose death without debate, and for the man which you
would make of me, my Rosamund.

"The man! And what is this man, this Gregory Darrell, that his welfare
be considered?--an ape who chatters to himself of kinship with the
archangels while filthily he digs for groundnuts! This much I know, at
bottom, durst I but be honest.

"Yet more clearly do I perceive that this same man, like all his
fellows, is a maimed god who walks the world dependent upon many wise
and evil counsellors. He must measure, and to a hair's-breadth, every
content of the world by means of a bloodied sponge, tucked somewhere in
his skull, which is ungeared by the first cup of wine and ruined by the
touch of his own finger. He must appraise all that he judges with no
better instruments than two bits of colored jelly, with a bungling
makeshift so maladroit that the nearest horologer's apprentice could
have devised a more accurate device. In fine, he is under penalty
condemned to compute eternity with false weights and to estimate
infinity with a yardstick: and he very often does it. For though, 'If
then I do that which I would not I consent unto the law,' saith even
the Apostle; yet the braver Pagan answers him, 'Perceive at last that
thou hast in thee something better and more divine than