ar
the executioner and the executioner's hut and the executioner's
daughter, the white girl with the hair that was red as blood. These were
all the men she knew; these made the world, the outer world, for her.
Her real world was where her father was with his tales of gods and
heroes, and his ancient songs and his great sword. It was her task,
self-chosen and rich in pride, to tend the great sword, to keep it
stainless, to sharpen its edge on the grindstone while she sang the Song
of the Sword, and the sparks flew and the great sword seemed to gleam
with an answering fervor. But never in all the days of her young life
had blood to be washed from the sword. For Sicily smiled under the sway
of King Robert the Good, who had no need for executioners.

But the father went sometimes into the city, where the girl never went,
and then the hours seemed long to the girl, and she often came to the
edge of the mountain and gazed down the white ribbon of winding road for
the earliest glimpse of the dear, familiar figure, toilsomely ascending.
To-day the hours seemed longer than ever, for there was the shadow of a
secret over the child's soul, and she sighed for her father's presence,
that she might tell him the secret and be free of it, though she knew
very well in her heart that when her father was by her side she would
still stifle her secret. A little secret, indeed, a laughable secret,
for those down there in Syracuse, at the foot of the mountain, who took
the world for what it was, but a great one to the soul of a girl who had
lived all her life on the top of a mountain in a dwelling whose roof was
the crest of a Moslem mosque, and whose garden palings were the pillars
of a temple of Aphrodite; a girl who took the world for what it was not
and for what it could never be.

The white road was as empty as a noon-day dream; its whiteness only
troubled by one moving object, as noon-day dreams are often troubled by
one persistent, inappreciable idea. But the girl had eyes as keen as a
mountain-eagle, and she knew that, whoever the climber was, the climber
was not her father. Then she sighed a little sigh and turned and entered
her dwelling and drew the door behind her, and the mountain-top was
lonely for a time. Only for a time. Up the hill came a fantastical
fellow, alternately singing and sighing, for it seemed that the fierce
heat vexed him despite of his melody. He was a strange ape, tall and
lean and withered, with a wry shoulde