if you again will pardon frankness, it is
less with the contents of my heart than with its continued motion that
you have any proper concern."

"Truly it is no affair of mine, Count Manuel, nor do any of your doings
matter to me. Therefore let us be going now, unless--O most unusual man,
who at the last assert your life to have been a successful and important
business,--unless you now desire some time wherein to bid farewell to
your loved wife and worshipped children and to all your other fine
works."

Dom Manuel shrugged broad shoulders. "And to what end? No, I am Manuel.
I have lived in the loneliness which is common to all men, but the
difference is that I have known it. Now it is necessary for me, as it is
necessary for all men, to die in this same loneliness, and I know that
there is no help for it."

"Once, Manuel, you feared to travel with me, and you bid Niafer mount in
your stead on my black horse, saying, 'Better she than I.'"

"Yes, yes, what curious things we do when we are boys! Well, I am wiser
now, for since then I have achieved all that I desired, save only to see
the ends of this world and to judge them, and I would have achieved that
too, perhaps, if only I had desired it a little more heartily. Yes, yes,
I tell you frankly, I have grown so used to getting my desire that I
believe, even now, if I desired you to go hence alone you also would
obey me."

Grandfather Death smiled thinly. "I reserve my own opinion. But take it
what you say is true,--and do you desire me to go hence alone?"

"No," says Manuel, very quietly.

Thereupon Dom Manuel passed to the western window, and he stood there,
looking out over broad rolling uplands. He viewed a noble country, good
to live in, rich with grain and metal, embowered with tall forests, and
watered by pleasant streams. Walled cities it had, and castles crowned
its eminences. Very far beneath Dom Manuel the leaded roofs of his
fortresses glittered in the sunset, for Storisende guarded the loftiest
part of all inhabited Poictesme. He overlooked, directly, the turrets or
Ranec and of Asch; to the south was Nerac; northward showed Perdigon:
and the prince of no country owned any finer castles than were these
four, in which lived Manuel's servants.

"It is strange," says Dom Manuel, "to think that everything I am seeing
was mine a moment since, and it is queer too to think of what a famous
fellow was this Manuel the Redeemer, and of the fine things he did, a