"It is the fool."

Robert moved a little nearer to Lycabetta, with strange fear and strange
hope in his heart. Through all the horrors and denials of the night,
through all his consciousness of a conspiracy he could neither fathom
nor baffle, his distraught mind carried some memory of Perpetua, and
that memory had steered him to the gate of Lycabetta's garden of
delight. At those gates he found no obstacle; his word was taken without
question; no unbridled hand sought to draw the mantle from his face;
unchallenged, untroubled, he had made his way through the sweet-smelling
lawns and arbors to Lycabetta's door. Perhaps she was not in the
conspiracy; perhaps she was loyal. These thoughts were racing through
his mind as he stood before her and cast the mantle from him; these
thoughts forced him towards her, forced him, with lips parted eagerly,
pitifully, like the lips of a thirst-goaded man, to speak.

"Do you know me?" he gasped, hoarsely, and his voice sounded strange
and unfamiliar in his ears, like the voice of a lost spirit.

Lycabetta smiled a little as she stretched herself carelessly on the
couch.

"Surely I know you," she answered, and at her words the warm blood
seemed to well back into Robert's heart, and he lifted up his hands in a
rapture.

"Heaven," he cried, "I thank you that all the world has not gone mad."

He mouthed the world's madness so bitterly that Lycabetta propped
herself on an elbow and eyed him curiously. She disliked Diogenes less
than the courtier-creatures did, for she had less chance to counter his
scathing phrases, and, besides, he was near the King, and it is ever
well to be friends with kings' neighbors.

"You seem angry," she said.

Robert answered her almost in a yell.

"Angry! The rage of hell raves in me. The night is full of voices, but I
will not hear them. The night is thick with terrors, but I will not fear
them."

He was pacing up and down the room now, striking his hands together,
trampling upon the rich furs that strewed the floor, as if they were his
enemies grovelling at his feet, so possessed with the hysterical passion
that he seemed to have forgotten the women who watched him and wondered.

Lysidice whispered in a low voice to Lycabetta, "He has gone mad."

Lycabetta nodded, tacitly agreeing. If the fool were mad, as in very
deed he seemed to be, she wished him well out of her borders. Madness
was one of the ugly things of life for which she had no pity; mad