get the little city down there?
Have you no heart?"

A strange smile passed over Felion's face, and he answered: "When one
forgets, why should the other remember?"

He turned and went into the house and shut the door, and though the man
knocked, the door was no opened, and he went back angry and miserable;
and the people could not believe that Felion would no come to help them,
as he had done all his life. A dawn three others came, and they found
Felion looking out towards the east, his lips moving as though he
prayed. Yet it was no prayer, only a call, that was on his lips. They
felt a sort of awe in his presence, for now he seemed as if he had lived
more than a century, so wise and old was the look of his face, so white
his hair, so set and distant his dignity. They begged him to come, and,
bringing his medicines, save the people, for death was galloping through
the town, knocking at many doors.

"One came to heal you," he answered--"the young man of the schools,
who wrote mystic letters after his name; it swings on a brass by his
door-where is he?"

"He is dead of the plague," they replied, "and the other also that came
with him, who fled before the sickness, fell dead of it on the roadside,
going to the sea."

"Why should I go?" he replied, and he turned threateningly to his
weapon, as if in menace of their presence.

"You have no one to leave behind," they answered eagerly, "and you are
old."

"Liars," he rejoined, "let the little city save itself!" and he wheeled
and went into his house, and they saw that they had erred in not
remembering his daughter, whose presence they had once prized. They saw
that they had angered him beyond soothing; and they went back in grief,
for two of them had lost dear relatives by the fell sickness. When they
told what had happened, the people said: "We will send the women; he
will listen to them--he had a daughter."

That afternoon, when all the hills lay still and dead, and nowhere did
bird or breeze stir, the women came, and they found him seated with his
back turned to the town. He was looking into the deep woods, into the
hot shadows of the trees.

"We have come to bring you to the little city," they said to him; "the
sick grow in numbers every hour."

"It is safe in the hills," he answered, not looking at them. "Why do the
people stay in the valley?"

"Every man has a friend, or a wife, or a child, ill or dying, and every
woman has a husband, or a child, or a frie