e unresting
wanderers. No sudden wrath, no ardent desire, no weariness or aversion
urges or delays them. How I love and honour them! They willingly submit
to the great law until the end of all things. What they appoint for
this hour is for it alone, not for the next one. Everything in the vast
universe is connected with them. Whoever should delay their course a
moment would make the earth reel. Night would become day, the rivers
would return to their sources. People would walk on their heads
instead of their feet, joy would be transformed to sorrow and power to
servitude. Therefore, child, the full moon has a different effect from
the waxing or waning one during the other twenty-nine nights of the
month. To ask of one what belongs to another is to expect an answer from
the foreigner who does not understand your language. How young you are,
child, and how foolish! To question the cords for you in the moonlight
now is to expect to gather grapes from thorns. Take my word for that!"

Here she interrupted the words uttered with so much difficulty, and
with her blackish-blue cotton dress wiped her perspiring face, strangely
flushed by the exertion and the firelight.

Ledscha had listened with increasing disappointment.

The wise old dame was doubtless right, yet before she ventured to the
sculptor's workshop the next day she must know at every cost how matters
stood, what she had to fear or to hope from him; so after a brief
silence she ventured to ask the question, "But are there only the stars
and the cords which predict what fate holds in store for one who is so
nearly allied to you?"

"No, child, no," was the reply. "But nothing can be clone about looking
into the future now. It requires rigid fasting from early dawn, and I
ate the dates you brought me. I inhaled the odor of the roasting ducks,
too, and then--it must be done at midnight; and at midnight your people
will be anxious if you are not at home by that time, or perhaps send a
slave to seek you here at my house, and that--that must not be done--I
must prevent it."

"So you are expecting some one," Ledscha eagerly replied. "And I know
who it is. Your son Satabus, or one of your grandsons. Else why are the
ducks cooked? And for what is the wine jar which I just took from its
hiding place?"

A vehement gesture of denial from Tabus contradicted the girl's
conjecture; but directly after she scanned her with a keen, searching
glance, and said: "No, no. We have no