posturing and bluntness and jovial laughter which
I have raised for my protecting. And that thought also is a grief."

Now Manuel was as Freydis had not ever seen him. She wondered at him,
she was perturbed by this fine lad's incomprehensible dreariness, with
soft red willing lips so near: and her dark eyes were bent upon him with
a beautiful and tender yearning which may not be told.

"I do not understand you, my dearest," said she, who was no longer the
high Queen of Audela, but a mortal woman. "It is true that all the world
about us is a false seeming, but you and I are real and utterly united,
for we have no concealments from each other. I am sure that no two
people could be happier than we are, nor better suited. And certainly
such morbid notions are not like you, who, as you said yourself, only
the other day, are naturally so frank and downright."

Now Manuel's thoughts came back from the clouds and the green and purple
of the mountains. He looked at her very gravely for an instant or two.
He laughed morosely. He said, "There!"

"But, dearest, you are strange and not yourself--

"Yes, yes!" says Manuel, kissing her, "for the moment I had forgotten to
be frank and downright, and all else which you expect of me. Now I am my
old candid, jovial, blunt self again, and I shall not worry you with
such silly notions any more. No, I am Manuel: I follow after my own
thinking and my own desire; and if to do that begets loneliness I must
endure it"

[Illustration]

XVIII

Manuel Chooses

"But I cannot understand," said Freydis, on a fine day in September,
"how it is that, now the power of Schamir is in your control, and you
have the secret of giving life to your images, you do not care to use
either the secret or the talisman. For you make no more images, you are
always saying, 'No, we will let that wait a bit,' and you do not even
quicken the ten caricatures of the image-makers which you have already
modeled."

"Life will be given to these in due time," said Manuel, "but that time
is not yet come. Meanwhile, I avoid practise of the old Tuyla mystery
for the sufficing reason that I have seen the result it has on the
practitioner. A geas was upon me to make a figure in the world, and so I
modeled and loaned life to such a splendid gay young champion as was to
my thinking and my desire. Thus my geas, I take it, is discharged, and a
thing done has an end. Heaven may now excel me by creating a larger
numbe