boy!"

Rathumus answered gravely:

"Pray the holy gods he will not misuse his power!"

Presently Nicanor came in, with the spell not yet shaken off him,
wanting his supper. A smaller image of his father he was, lean and
shock-headed, with gray steady eyes changing from the stillness of
childhood's innocence to the depth and wonder of dawning knowledge.

Rathumus said:

"What hast been doing, boy?"

Nicanor stretched like one arousing from sleep.

"I know not," he answered. "Perhaps I slept out under the moon last
night and she hath turned my head.--Father, I have been thinking. When I
am become a man I shall do great things. Even you have told me that the
destiny of a man's life lieth between his hands."

"Son," Rathumus said quickly, "remember also that men's hands lie
between the hands of the gods, even as a slave's between the hands of
his over-lord. Keep it in mind, child, that thou art very young, that
thy first strength hath not yet come upon thee; and strive not to teach
to others what thou hast not learned thyself. For that way lies mockery
and the scorn of men."

"Now I do not understand where thy words would lead," Nicanor said; and
his gray eyes, in the wavering torchlight, were doubtful. "I teach no
one. Perhaps--it was not I who slept under the moon, after all."

For he was young, and though his parents saw what had come upon him, he
himself saw not.

So Nicanor had his supper, of black bean-porridge, taking no thought of
those parents' loving thought for him; and later climbed the ladder to
the loft where he slept. After a while, Susanna, yearning over her boy
in this, the first dim hour of his awakening,--yearning all the more
since she saw that he was following blindly the workings of his own
appointed fate, without any sense or knowledge of it himself,--went up
the ladder also and sat beside him, thinking him asleep. But Nicanor put
out a hand and slid it into hers, and shuffled in his straw until he was
close against her. She gathered him into her arms, his shaggy head upon
her breast, and rocked him to and fro in the darkness. To-morrow he
would go where this fate of his called him; but this last night he must
be hers, all hers, who had borne him only to give him up. Nicanor,
stupid with sleep and comfort, murmured drowsily, and she bent close
over him to listen.

"Mother, three nights ago my father spoke of Melchior, and the name hath
lingered in my head. Who was he? What was he?"