arvation. Often the women would not take what he
offered. Their journey was a hard and hungry one. They must make it
all on foot and there was little food to be found. But each of them
knew how to live on scant fare. They traveled mostly by night and
slept among the ferns and undergrowth through the day. They drank from
running brooks and bathed in them. Moss and ferns made soft and
sweet-smelling beds, and trees roofed them. Sometimes they lay long
and talked while they rested. And at length a day came when they knew
they were nearing their journey's end.

"It is nearly over now," Marco said, after they had thrown themselves
down in the forest in the early hours of one dewy morning. "He said
'After Samavia, go back to London as quickly as you can--AS QUICKLY AS
YOU CAN.' He said it twice. As if--something were going to happen."

"Perhaps it will happen more suddenly than we think--the thing he
meant," answered The Rat.

Suddenly he sat up on his elbow and leaned towards Marco.

"We are in Samavia!" he said "We two are in Samavia! And we are near
the end!"

Marco rose on his elbow also. He was very thin as a result of hard
travel and scant feeding. His thinness made his eyes look immense and
black as pits. But they burned and were beautiful with their own fire.

"Yes," he said, breathing quickly. "And though we do not know what the
end will be, we have obeyed orders. The Prince was next to the last
one. There is only one more. The old priest."

"I have wanted to see him more than I have wanted to see any of the
others," The Rat said.

"So have I," Marco answered. "His church is built on the side of this
mountain. I wonder what he will say to us."

Both had the same reason for wanting to see him. In his youth he had
served in the monastery over the frontier--the one which, till it was
destroyed in a revolt, had treasured the five-hundred-year-old story of
the beautiful royal lad brought to be hidden among the brotherhood by
the ancient shepherd. In the monastery the memory of the Lost Prince
was as the memory of a saint. It had been told that one of the early
brothers, who was a decorator and a painter, had made a picture of him
with a faint halo shining about his head. The young acolyte who had
served there must have heard wonderful legends. But the monastery had
been burned, and the young acolyte had in later years crossed the
frontier and become the priest of a few mountaineers whos