suppose that even you deny that."

"No, I do not deny that this glowing mendacity adds to the hall's
appearance."

"So now, you see for yourself!" said Niafer, triumphantly. And after
that her new ancestry was never questioned.

And in the meanwhile Dom Manuel had sent messengers over land and sea to
his half-sister Math at Rathgor, bidding her sell the mill for what it
would fetch. She obeyed, and brought to Manuel's court her husband and
their two boys, the younger of whom rose later to be Pope of Rome.
Manuel gave the miller the vacant fief of Montors; and thereafter you
could nowhere have found a statelier fine lady than the Countess
Matthiette de Montors. She was still used to speak continually of what
was becoming to people of our station in life, but it was with a large
difference; and she got on with Niafer as well as could be expected, but
no better.

And early in the summer of the first year of Manuel's reign (just after
Dom Manuel fetched to Storisende the Sigel of Scoteia, as the spoils of
his famous fight with Oriander the Swimmer), the stork brought to Niafer
the first of the promised boys. For the looks of the thing, this child
was named, not after the father whom Manuel had just killed, but after
the Emmerick who was Manuel's nominal father: and it was this Emmerick
that afterward reigned long and notably in Poictesme.

So matters went prosperously with Dom Manuel, and there was nothing to
trouble his peace of mind, unless it were some feeling of responsibility
for the cult of Sesphra, whose worship was now increasing everywhere
among the nations. In Philistia, in particular, Sesphra was now
worshipped openly in the legislative halls and churches, and all other
religion, and all decency, was smothered under the rituals of Sesphra.
Everywhere to the west and north his followers were delivering windy
discourses and performing mad antics, and great hurt came of it all by
and by. But if this secretly troubled Dom Manuel; the Count, here as
elsewhere, exercised to good effect his invaluable gift for holding his
tongue.

Nor did he ever speak of Freydis either, though it is recorded that when
news came of the end which she had made in Teamhair under the oppression
of the Druids and the satirists, Dom Manuel went silently into the Room
of Ageus, and was not seen any more that day. That in such solitude he
wept is improbable, for his hard vivid eyes had forgotten this way of
exercise, but it is highly pr