-a lean man called Ahasuerus--said,
"Who forbids it?" and carried them uneventfully from Novogath to
Sargyll. They narrate how Oriander the Swimmer followed after the yellow
ship, but he attempted no hurt against Manuel, at least not for that
turn.

Thus Manuel came again to Freydis. He had his first private talk with
her in a room that was hung with black and gold brocade. White mats lay
upon the ground, and placed irregularly about the room were large brass
vases filled with lotus blossoms. Here Freydis sat on a three-legged
stool, in conference with a panther. From the ceiling hung rigid blue
and orange and reddish-brown serpents, all dead and embalmed; and in the
middle of the ceiling was painted a face which was not quite human,
looking downward, with evil eyes half closed, and with its mouth half
open in discomfortable laughter.

Freydis was clad in scarlet completely, and, as has been said, a golden
panther was talking to her when Dom Manuel came in. She at once
dismissed the beast, which smiled amicably at Dom Manuel, and then
arched high its back in the manner of all the cat tribe, and so
flattened out into a thin transparent goldness, and, flickering,
vanished upward as a flame leaves a lampwick.

"Well, well, you bade me come to you, dear friend, when I had need of
you," says Manuel, very cordially shaking hands, "and nobody's need
could be more great than mine."

"Different people have different needs," Freydis replied, rather
gravely, "but all passes in this world."

"Friendship, however, does not pass, I hope."

She answered slowly: "It is we who pass, so that the young Manuel whom I
loved in a summer that is gone, is nowadays as perished as that summer's
gay leaves. What, grizzled fighting-man, have you to do with that young
Manuel who had comeliness and youth and courage, but no human pity and
no constant love? and why should I be harboring his lighthearted
mischiefs against you? Ah, no, gray Manuel, you are quite certain no
woman would do that; and people say you are shrewd. So I bid you very
welcome to Sargyll, where my will is the only law."

"You at least have not changed," Dom Manuel replied, with utter truth,
"for you appear today, if anything, more fair and young than you were
that first night upon Morven when I evoked you from tall flames to lend
life to the image I had made. Well, that seems now a lengthy while ago,
and I make no more images."

"Your wife would be considering it a wast