ve heard the histories of presumptuous men who attempted
to perform such miracles, and all these persons sooner or later came to
misery."

"Why, to be sure! to whom else would you have them coming?" said
Freydis. And she explained the way it was.

Manuel put many questions. All that evening he was thoughtful, and he
was unusually tender with Freydis. And that night, when Freydis slept,
Dom Manuel kissed her very lightly, then blinked his eyes, and for a
moment covered them with his hand. Standing thus, the tall boy queerly
moving his mouth, as though it were stiff and he were trying to make it
more supple.

Then he armed himself. He took up the black shield upon which was
painted a silver stallion. He crept out of their modest magic home and
went down into Bellegarde, where he stole him a horse, from the stables
of Duke Asmund.

And that night, and all the next day, Dom Manuel rode beyond Aigremont
and Naimes, journeying away from Morven, and away from the house of
jasper and porphyry and violet and yellow breccia, and away from
Freydis, who had put off immortality for his kisses. He travelled
northward, toward the high woods of Dun Vlechlan, where the leaves were
aglow with the funereal flames of autumn: for the summer wherein Dom
Manuel and Freydis had been happy together was now as dead as that
estranged queer time which he had shared with Alianora.

[Illustration]

XIX

The Head of Misery

When Manuel had reached the outskirts of the forest he encountered there
a knight in vermilion armor, with a woman's sleeve wreathed about his
helmet: and, first of all, this knight demanded who was Manuel's lady
love.

"I have no living love," said Manuel, "except the woman whom I am
leaving without ceremony, because it seems the only way to avoiding
argument."

"But that is unchivalrous, and does not look well."

"Very probably you are right, but I am not chivalrous. I am Manuel. I
follow after my own thinking, and an obligation is upon me pointing
toward prompt employment of the knowledge I have gained from this
woman."

"You are a rascally betrayer of women, then, and an unmanly scoundrel."

"Yes, I suppose so, for I betrayed another woman, in that I permitted
and indeed assisted her to die in my stead; and so brought yet another
bond upon myself, and an obligation which is drawing me from a homelike
place and from soft arms wherein I was content enough," says Manuel,
sighing.

But the chivalrous