g into tenderness, he
drowned his emotion in a loud grumble.

"Father," said Dea, "how roughly you scold!"

"It's because I don't like to see people too happy."

Here Homo re-echoed Ursus. His growl was heard from beneath the lovers'
feet.

Ursus stooped down, and placed his hand on Homo's head.

"That's right; you're in bad humour, too. You growl. The bristles are
all on end on your wolf's pate. You don't like all this love-making.
That's because you are wise. Hold your tongue, all the same. You have
had your say and given your opinion; be it so. Now be silent."

The wolf growled again. Ursus looked under the table at him.

"Be still, Homo! Come, don't dwell on it, you philosopher!"

But the wolf sat up, and looked towards the door, showing his teeth.

"What's wrong with you now?" said Ursus. And he caught hold of Homo by
the skin of the neck.

Heedless of the wolf's growls, and wholly wrapped up in her own thoughts
and in the sound of Gwynplaine's voice, which left its after-taste
within her, Dea was silent, and absorbed by that kind of esctasy
peculiar to the blind, which seems at times to give them a song to
listen to in their souls, and to make up to them for the light which
they lack by some strain of ideal music. Blindness is a cavern, to which
reaches the deep harmony of the Eternal.

While Ursus, addressing Homo, was looking down, Gwynplaine had raised
his eyes. He was about to drink a cup of tea, but did not drink it. He
placed it on the table with the slow movement of a spring drawn back;
his fingers remained open, his eyes fixed. He scarcely breathed.

A man was standing in the doorway, behind Dea. He was clad in black,
with a hood. He wore a wig down to his eyebrows, and held in his hand
an iron staff with a crown at each end. His staff was short and massive.
He was like Medusa thrusting her head between two branches in Paradise.

Ursus, who had heard some one enter and raised his head without loosing
his hold of Homo, recognized the terrible personage. He shook from head
to foot, and whispered to Gwynplaine,--

"It's the wapentake."

Gwynplaine recollected. An exclamation of surprise was about to escape
him, but he restrained it. The iron staff, with the crown at each end,
was called the iron weapon. It was from this iron weapon, upon which the
city officers of justice took the oath when they entered on their
duties, that the old wapentakes of the English police derived their
qualificatio