nd less fitted to cope with affairs of
state, and one day he instructed his son Art to take the rule during his
absence, and he set out for Ben Edair.

For a great wish had come upon him to walk beside the sea; to listen
to the roll and boom of long, grey breakers; to gaze on an unfruitful,
desolate wilderness of waters; and to forget in those sights all that
he could forget, and if he could not forget then to remember all that he
should remember.

He was thus gazing and brooding when one day he observed a coracle
drawing to the shore. A young girl stepped from it and walked to him
among black boulders and patches of yellow sand.

CHAPTER III

Being a king he had authority to ask questions. Conn asked her,
therefore, all the questions that he could think of, for it is not every
day that a lady drives from the sea, and she wearing a golden-fringed
cloak of green silk through which a red satin smock peeped at the
openings. She replied to his questions, but she did not tell him all the
truth; for, indeed, she could not afford to.

She knew who he was, for she retained some of the powers proper to the
worlds she had left, and as he looked on her soft yellow hair and on her
thin red lips, Conn recognised, as all men do, that one who is lovely
must also be good, and so he did not frame any inquiry on that count;
for everything is forgotten in the presence of a pretty woman, and a
magician can be bewitched also.

She told Conn that the fame of his son Art had reached even the
Many-Coloured Land, and that she had fallen in love with the boy. This
did not seem unreasonable to one who had himself ventured much in Faery,
and who had known so many of the people of that world leave their own
land for the love of a mortal.

"What is your name, my sweet lady?" said the king.

"I am called Delvcaem (Fair Shape) and I am the daughter of Morgan," she
replied.

"I have heard much of Morgan," said the king. "He is a very great
magician."

During this conversation Conn had been regarding her with the minute
freedom which is right only in a king. At what precise instant he forgot
his dead consort we do not know, but it is certain that at this moment
his mind was no longer burdened with that dear and lovely memory. His
voice was melancholy when he spoke again.

"You love my son!"

"Who could avoid loving him?" she murmured.

"When a woman speaks to a man about the love she feels for another man
she is not liked. And," he