“He babbled of Autumn’s bankruptcy and of the age-long lying promises of Spring; and of his own desire to be at rest; and of running waters and of decaying leaves.  He babbled of the far-off stars; and he debated whether they were the eyes of God or gases which burned, and he demonstrated, with logic, that neither existed.  At times he stumbled as he stared about him and munched his apples, so that he was all bemired, but I walked in the trodden path.

“And the path led to the gateway of a citadel, and through the gateway.  ‘Let us not enter,’ he said, ’for the citadel is vacant, and, moreover, I am in profound terror, and, besides, I have not as yet eaten all my apples.’  And he wept aloud, but I was not afraid, for I had walked in the trodden path.”

Again there was a silence.  “You paint a dreary world, my Prince.”

“My little Miguel, I paint the world as the Eternal Father made it.  The laws of the place are written large, so that all may read them; and we know that every road, whether it be my trodden path or some byway through your gayer meadows, yet leads in the end to God.  We have our choice,—­or to come to Him as a laborer comes at evening for the day’s wages fairly earned, or to come as a roisterer haled before the magistrate.”

“I consider you to be in the right,” the boy said, after a lengthy interval, “although I decline—­and decline emphatically—­to believe you.”

The Prince laughed.  “There spoke Youth,” he said, and he sighed as though he were a patriarch.  “But we have sung, we two, the Eternal Tenson of God’s will and of man’s desires.  And I claim the prize, my Little Miguel.”

Suddenly the page kissed one huge hand.  “You have conquered, my very dull and very glorious Prince.  Concerning that Hawise—­” But Miguel de Rueda choked.  “Oh, I do not understand! and yet in part I understand!” the boy wailed in the darkness.

And the Prince laid one hand upon his page’s hair, and smiled in the darkness to note how soft was this hair, since the man was less a fool than at first view you might have taken him to be; and he said: 

“One must play the game out fairly, my lad.  We are no little people, she and I, the children of many kings, of God’s regents here on earth; and it was never reasonable, my Miguel, that gentlefolk should cheat at their dicing.”

The same night Miguel de Rueda repeated the prayer which Saint Theophilus made long ago to the Mother of God: 

    “Dame, je n’ose,
  Flors d’aiglentier et lis et rose,
  En qui li filz Diex se repose,”

and so on.  Or, in other wording:  “Hearken, O gracious Lady! thou that art more fair than any flower of the eglantine, more comely than the blossoming of the rose or of the lily! thou to whom was confided the very Son of God!  Harken, for I am afraid! afford counsel to me that am ensnared by Satan and know not what to do!  Never will I make an end of praying.  O Virgin debonnaire!  O honored Lady!  Thou that wast once a woman—!”