s and the drift of time; but the changing years brought few
visitors to the shrine. King Robert himself never came again, for with
that day had begun the bitter disappointment which shadowed the rest of
the good King's life. And if the King did not visit the temple himself
had erected, the rest of Syracuse was ready enough to follow his
example. For the way was long, the road only in part possible for horse
travel, and the rest of the ascent steep and arduous. The few appointed
priests did their daily offices in the lonely building to a scanty
congregation consisting of Theron and his child, with now and then such
of the country folk as chose rather to climb to the lonely church upon
the height than to descend to the more populous places of worship that
lay along the valley.

But to-day the condition of things was strangely changed. In the mellow
light of the late afternoon the grassy platform below the rock on which
the church stood was thronged with a brilliant assemblage of men and
women, as unfamiliar to the bronze archangel as the bronze archangel was
unfamiliar to them. Within a circle of men-at-arms in shining shirts of
mail and pointed helmets, and of knights more heavily armored and
appointed with fantastically painted shields, stood at one side the
lords and ladies who made up the flower of the new King's court, and on
the other all the principal ecclesiastics of Syracuse. Court and Church
vied with each other in splendor of apparel. The jewels that gleamed on
the hands and in the hair and round the neck of beautiful women and
comely men stiffened with no lesser splendor the vestments of the
princes of the Church, whose robes, as rich as the gorgeous garments of
the court, answered color with color and texture with texture. A
Sicilian nurtured in the school of Robert the Good would have frowned at
the effrontery with which the women audaciously intensified the clinging
fit of the garments, which moulded the form so precisely, and would have
deplored the elegance, the effeminate foppery, which the comrades of the
new King had imported with them as part and parcel of the Neapolitan
inheritance. But the new-comers cared nothing for the opinion of the
old-fashioned adherents of a dead king and a dead day; their desire was,
as their master's, to renew the delights of Naples under a Sicilian sky
and to enrich life to the limit with all the luxury that could add a
grace to grace and give a sharper zest to pleasure.