y. "For I had thought to lie, and in my mouth the lie
turned to a truth. At least, I do not profit by my false-dealing, and I
wave you farewell with empty hands burned clean of theft."

Then she who was a human woman said, "But you have burned your hand!"

"It does not matter: I have ointments yonder. Make haste, Queen Freydis,
for the hour passes wherein the moon is void and powerless."

"There is time." She brought out water from the enclosure, and swiftly
bathed Dom Manuel's hand.

From the fire now came a whispering, "Make haste, Queen Freydis! make
haste, dear Fairy mistress!"

"There is time," said Freydis, "and do you stop flurrying me!" She
brought from the enclosure a pot of ointment, and she dressed Manuel's
hand.

"Borram, borram, Leanhaun shee!" the fire crackled. "Now the hour ends."

Then Freydis sprang from Manuel, toward the flames beyond which she was
queen of ancient mysteries, and beyond which her will was neither to
loose nor to bind. And she cried hastily, "A penny, a penny, twopence--"

But just for a moment she looked back at Morven, and at the man who
waited upon Morven alone and hurt. In his firelit eyes she saw love out
of measure and without hope. And in the breast of Freydis moved the
heart of a human woman.

"I cannot help it," she said, as the hour passed. "Somebody has to
bandage it, and men have no sense in these matters."

Whereon the fire roared angrily, and leaped, and fell dead, for the
Moon-Children Bil and Hjuki had returned from the well which is called
Byrgir, and the moon was no longer void and powerless.

"So, does that feel more comfortable?" said Freydis. She knew that
within this moment age and sorrow and death had somewhere laid
inevitable ambuscades, from which to assail her by and by, for she was
mortal after the sacred fire's extinction, and she meant to make the
best of it.

For a while Count Manuel did not speak. Then he said, in a shaking
voice: "O woman dear and lovely and credulous and compassionate, it is
you and you alone that I must be loving eternally with such tenderness
as is denied to proud and lonely queens on their tall thrones! And it is
you that I must be serving always with such a love as may not be given
to the figure that any man makes in this world! And though all life may
be a dusty waste of endless striving, and though the ways of men may
always be the ways of folly, yet are these ways our ways henceforward,
and not hopeless ways, for y