ed. Perpetua flung back the door and
faced the insistent fool.

"Is doom-crack at hand," she asked, quietly, as she eyed the strange
figure before her, "that you hammer so hotly?"

The misshapen petitioner surrendered something of his malevolence to the
beauty of the girl. He swept her a salutation that exaggerated
courtliness, and there was a quality of apology in his voice as he
spoke.

"I am sand dry as the ancient desert, and to be thirsty roughens my
temper. Ply me tongue-high with wine and I will pipe for you blithely."

Perpetua shook her head, and her red locks gleamed and quivered with the
motion like an aureole of flame.

"I have no wine," she said, gravely, "for my father denies its virtues.
But there is a pitcher of milk within at your pleasure."

At the mention of the word milk the face of the petitioning fool, ugly
enough when untroubled by crosses, took upon itself an expression so
hideous that if the girl's spirit had ever permitted her to recoil from
any terror she might have recoiled from that.

"Milk!" he yelped, and the sound of his voice was as ugly as the show of
his face. "Milk! Gods of the Greeks! Milk! Your father is no less than a
fool to favor such liquor."

The girl's red eyebrows knitted. "Unless you mend your manners," she
said, decisively, "you shall go as thirsty as you came. You dare not
speak so to my father's face."

The fool answered with a little crackling laugh, while the wide sweep
of his withered fingers seemed at once to plead for forgiveness and to
justify impertinence.

"Fair virgin of the heights and of the hollows," he cackled, "I would
speak so to his face or to his foot or to any part of his honorable
anatomy, for, you see, I am a fool myself, and may pass the crazy name
without cuffing. Come, I will sip your white syrup to please you."

The girl shrugged her shoulders at the sudden condescension. "Please
yourself. There is water, if you disdain milk."

The hunchback twisted his pliant features into a new and peculiarly
repulsive form of protest.

"Even as there is the devil if you escape from the deep sea," he
sneered. "I begin to lust after milk now."

The maiden looked at him for a moment, with a curious pity for his
changing moods and his changeless deformity. Then she turned and entered
her home, from which she emerged a moment later with a vessel of milk in
one hand and a silver cup in the other. She filled the cup with milk and
handed it to the fool