en in their thoughts.

"I knew if you didn't it'd be because you were angry or were afraid, and
you didn't look angry."

"How does one look when one is angry?"

"Like my father."

"And how does your father look?"

"My father's dead."

"Did he die of the plague?" asked Felion, laying his hand on the lad's
shoulder.

"No," said the lad quickly, and shut his lips tight.

"Won't you tell me?" asked Felion, with a strange inquisitiveness.

"No. Mother'll tell you, but I won't." The lad's eyes filled with tears.

"Poor boy--poor boy!" said Felion, and his hand tightened on the small
shoulder.

"Don't be sorry for me; be sorry for mother, please," said the boy, and
he laid a hand on the old man's knee, and that touch went to a heart
long closed against the little city below; and Felion rose and said: "I
will go with you to your mother."

Then he went into another room, and the boy came near the axe and ran
his fingers along the bright steel, and fondled the handle, as does a
hunter the tried weapon which has been his through many seasons. When
the old man came back he said to the boy: "Why do you look at the axe?"

"I don't know," was the answer; "maybe because my mother used to sing
a song about the wood-cutters." Without a word, and thinking much, he
stepped out into the path leading to the little city, the lad holding
one hand. Years afterwards men spoke with a sort of awe or reverence
of seeing the beautiful stranger lad leading old Felion into the
plague-stricken place, and how, as they passed, women threw themselves
at Felion's feet, begging him to save their loved ones. And a drunkard
cast his arm round the old man's shoulder and sputtered foolish
pleadings in his ear; but Felion only waved them back gently, and said:
"By-and-by, by-and-by--God help us all!"

Now a fevered hand snatched at him from a doorway, moanings came from
everywhere, and more than once he almost stumbled over a dead body;
others he saw being carried away to the graveyard for hasty burial. Few
were the mourners that followed, and the faces of those who watched the
processions go by were set and drawn. The sunlight and the green trees
seemed an insult to the dead.

They passed into the house where the sick woman lay, and some met him at
the door with faces of joy and meaning; for now they knew the woman
and would have spoken to him of her; but he waved them off, and put his
fingers upon his lips and went where a fire burned in a k