e toiler in Pherae.

For even as it was with the divinity of Delos, so is it likewise with
the genius of a man, which, being born of a god, yet is bound as a slave
to the grindstone. Since even as Hermes mocked the Lord of the Unerring
Bow, so is genius mocked of the world, when it has bartered the herds,
and the grain, and the rod that metes wealth, for the seven chords that
no ear, dully mortal, can hear.

And as he looked upon this symbol of his life, the captivity and the
calamity, the strength and the slavery of his existence overcame him;
and for the first hour since he had been born of a woman Arslan buried
his face in his hands and wept.

He could bend great thoughts to take the shapes that he chose, as the
chained god in Pherae bound the strong kings of the desert and forest to
carry his yoke; yet, like the god, he likewise stood fettered to the
mill to grind for bread.

* * *

One evening, a little later, he met her in the fields on the same spot
where Marcellin first had seen her as a child amongst the scarlet blaze
of the poppies.

The lands were all yellow with saffron and emerald with the young corn;
she balanced on her head a great brass jar; the red girdle glowed about
her waist as she moved: the wind stirred the folds of her garments; her
feet were buried in the shining grass; clouds tawny and purple were
behind her; she looked like some Moorish phantom seen in a dream under a
sky of Spain.

He paused and gazed at her with eyes half content, half cold.

She was of a beauty so uncommon, so strange, and all that was his for
his art:--a great artist, whether in words, in melody, or in colour, is
always cruel, or at the least seems so, for all things that live under
the sun are to him created only to minister to his one inexorable
passion.

Art is so vast, and human life is so little. It is to him only supremely
just that the insect of an hour should be sacrificed to the infinite and
eternal truth which must endure until the heavens themselves shall
wither as a scroll that is held in a flame. It might have seemed to
Arslan base to turn her ignorance, and submission to his will, for the
gratification of his amorous passions; but to make these serve the art
to which he had himself abandoned every earthly good was in his sight
justified, as the death agonies of the youth whom they decked with roses
and slew in sacrifice to the sun, were in the sight of the Mexican
nation.

The