na, shall be monstrously amused by this.

"Then I shall certainly return to you, when your tears are dried, and
when you no longer believe what young Niafer once believed; and when,
remembering young Niafer's desires and her intentions as to the disposal
of her life, you will shrug withered shoulders. To go on living will
remain desirable. The dilapidations of life will no longer move you
deeply. Shrugging, you will say of sorrow, 'What is it?' for you will
know grief also to be impermanent. And your inability to be quite
miserable any more will assure you that your goings are attended by the
ghost of outlived and conquered misery: and I, whom some call Beda, and
others call Kruchina, shall be monstrously amused by this."

Said Niafer, impatiently, "Do you intend to keep me here forever under
these dark twinkling trees, with your thin little talking, while Manuel
stays unhappy through his want of me?"

And Misery answered nothing as he departed from Niafer, for a season.

Such were the happenings in the vision witnessed by Dom Manuel (as Dom
Manuel afterward declared) while he sat playing upon the flageolet.

[Illustration]

XXIII

Manuel Gets His Desire

Now the tale tells that all this while, near the gray hut in Dun
Vlechlan, the earthen image of Niafer lay drying out in the November
sun; and that gray Dom Manuel--no longer the florid boy who had come
into Dun Vlechlan,--sat at the feet of the image, and played upon a
flageolet the air which Suskind had taught him, and with which he had
been used to call young Suskind from her twilit places when Manuel was a
peasant tending swine. Now Manuel was an aging nobleman, and Niafer was
now a homeless ghost, but the tune had power over them, none the less,
for its burden was young love and the high-hearted time of youth; so
that the melody which once had summoned Suskind from her low
red-pillared palace in the doubtful twilight, now summoned Niafer
resistlessly from paradise, as Manuel thriftily made use of the odds and
ends which he had learned from three women to win him a fourth woman.

The spirit of Niafer entered at the mouth of the image. Instantly the
head sneezed, and said, "I am unhappy." But Manuel kept on playing. The
spirit descended further, bringing life to the lungs and the belly, so
that the image then cried, "I am hungry." But Manuel kept on playing. So
the soul was drawn further and further, until Manuel saw that the white
image had taken on