re last night, one of those that came with us out of Naples."
He shivered as he spoke, and his bird-like claws fumbled at his breast
in an attempt to make the unfamiliar sign of the cross. But the face of
the girl showed no answering alarm.

"Neither the plague nor the King's rage need be feared in these
forests," she said. "The pure breezes here bear balsam. As for the
King's rage, there are caves in these woods where a man might hide, snug
and warm, for a century. Bush and tree yield fruits and nuts in plenty,
for a simple stomach."

"I will keep myself alive, I warrant you," Diogenes responded, "and to
pay for your favor I will sing you a song." So he began to sing, or
rather to croak, to a Neapolitan air, the words of the Venus-song of the
light women of Naples:

"Venus stretched her arms, and said,
'Cool Adonis, fool Adonis,
Hasten to my golden bed--'"

Perpetua's face flamed, and she put her fingers in her ears. "Away with
you! away with you!" she commanded.

The fool stopped in his measure; it was no use piping to deaf ears.
"Farewell, fair prudery," he chuckled, and in a series of fantastic hops
and bounds he reached the edge of the pine wood and soon was lost to
sight within its sheltering depths.

II

THE COMING OF THE KING

When the last gleam of the fool's parti-colored habit had disappeared in
the sanctuary of the wood, Perpetua took her hands from her ears and
seated herself on a fragment of a fallen column that had formerly made
part of the colonnade of the Temple of Venus. Here she sat for a while
with her hands listlessly clasped, trying to disentangle the puzzling
web of her thoughts. Her most immediate sensation was delight at the
departure of Diogenes. The warm, fair day seemed to have grown old and
cold with his world wisdom, a wisdom so different from all that she had
ever been taught to venerate as wise.

"If I were a bird," she sighed aloud, "I could not sing while he was
near. If I were a flower, I should fade at his coming."

She rose from her throne and blew kisses on her finger-tips to the
birds that sang about her, to the flowers that flamed beneath her feet.
"Be happy, birds," she whispered; "be happy, flowers, for the withered
fool has gone."

She spoke to the birds, she spoke to the flowers as she would have
spoken to human friends if she had any; they were her friends, and she
loved them dearly, and she believed with all her heart that they
unders