t now," said the king, "and think clearly. Have you not
learned courage and hardiness? Have not your labours brought you
strength; your perils, wisdom; your wounds, patience? Has not your
task broken chains for you, and lifted you out of sloth and above
fear? Do you say that the stone that has done this for you is false, a
thing of naught?"

"Is this true?" said the man, trembling and sinking on his knee.

"It is true," answered the king, "as God lives, it is true. Come,
stand at my right hand. My jewels that I seek are not dead, but alive.
But the stone which led you here--look! has it a flaw?"

He stooped and lifted the jewel. The light of his face fell upon it.
And in the blue depths of the sapphire the man saw a star.

[Illustration]

THE MUSIC-LOVER

The Music-Lover had come to his favourite seat. It was in the front
row of the balcony, just where the curve reaches its outermost point,
and, like a rounded headland, meets the unbroken flow of the
long-rolling, invisible waves of rhythmical sound.

The value of that chosen place did not seem to be known to the world,
else there would have been a higher price demanded for the privilege
of occupying it. People were willing to pay far more to get into the
boxes, or even to have a chair reserved on the crowded level of the
parquet.

But the Music-Lover cared little for fashion, and had long ago ceased
to reckon the worth of things by the prices asked for them in the
market.

He knew that his coign of vantage, by some secret confluence of
architectural lines, gave him the very best of the delight of hearing
that the vast concert-hall contained. It was for that delight that he
was thirsting, and he surrendered himself to it confidently and
entirely.

He had arrived at an oasis in the day. Since morning he had been
toiling through the Sahara of the city's noise: arid, senseless,
inhospitable noise: roaring of wheels, clanging of bells, shrieking of
whistles, clatter of machinery, squawking of horns, raucous and
strident voices: confused, bewildering, exhausting noise, a desolate
and unfriendly desert of heard ugliness.

Now all that waste, howling wilderness was shut out by the massive
walls of the concert-hall, and he found himself in a haven of refuge.

But silence alone would not have healed and restored his spirit. It
needed something more than the absence of harsh and brutal and
meaningless noise to satisfy him. It needed the presence of music: