moving jaws
a head of sleek white clay. The golden loveliness of Alianora, and the
dark splendor of Freydis and, derisively, the immortal young smile of
Sesphra, showed each for a moment, and was gone. Then Niafer's eyes
displayed their mildly wondering disapproval for the last time, and the
small faces of children that in the end were hers and not Manuel's
passed with her: and the shine of armor, and a tossing heave of jaunty
banners, and gleaming castle turrets, and all the brilliancies and
colors that Manuel had known and loved anywhere, save only the clear red
and white of Suskind's face, seemed to be passing incoherently through
the still waters, like bright broken wreckage which an undercurrent was
sweeping away.

And Manuel sighed, almost as if in relief. "So this," he said, "this is
the preposterous end of him who was everywhere esteemed the most lucky
and the least scrupulous rogue of his day!"

"Yes, yes," replied Grandfather Death, as slowly he untethered one by
one the swine of Eubouleus. "Yes, it is indeed the end, since all your
life is passing away there, to be beheld by your old eyes alone, for the
last time. Thus I see nothing there but ordinary water, and I wonder
what it is you find in that dark pool to keep you staring so."

"I do not very certainly know," said Manuel, "but, a little more and
more mistily now, I seem to see drowned there all the loves and the
desires and the adventures I had when I wore another body than this
dilapidated gray body I now wear. And yet it is a deceiving water, for
there, where it should reflect the remnants of the old fellow that is I,
it shows, instead, the face of a young boy who is used to following
after his own thinking and his own desires."

"Certainly it is queer you should be saying that; for that, as everybody
knows, was the favorite by-word of your namesake the famous Count Manuel
who is so newly dead in Poictesme yonder.... But what is that thing?"

Manuel raised from looking at the water just the handsome and florid
young face which Manuel had seen reflected in the water. As his memories
vanished, the tall boy incuriously wondered who might be the snub-nosed
stranger that was waiting there with the miller's pigs, and was
pointing, as if in mild surprise, toward the two stones overgrown with
moss and supporting a cross of old worm-eaten wood. For the stranger
pointed at the unfinished, unsatisfying image which stood beside the
pool of Haranton, wherein,