The jester had stood there, and looked down with deep-set, eager eyes, his crooked face pathetically sad and drawn, but alive with a swift and meaning intelligence, while the thin and mobile lips expressed a sort of ready malice which could break out in bitterness or turn to a kindly irony according as the touch that moved the man’s sensitive nature was cruel or friendly.  He was scarcely taller than a boy of ten years old, but his full-grown arms hung down below his knees, and his man’s head, with the long, keen face, was set far forward on his shapeless body, so that in speaking with persons of ordinary stature he looked up under his brows, a little sideways, to see better.  Smooth red hair covered his bony head, and grew in a carefully trimmed and pointed beard on his pointed chin.  A loose doublet of crimson velvet hid the outlines of his crooked back and projecting breastbone, and the rest of his dress was of materials as rich, and all red.  He was, moreover, extraordinarily careful of his appearance, and no courtier had whiter or more delicately tended hands or spent more time before the mirror in tying a shoulder knot, and in fastening the stiffened collar of white embroidered linen at the fashionable angle behind his neck.

He had entered the latticed gallery on his way to Don John’s apartments with the King’s message.  A small and half-concealed door, known to few except the servants of the palace, opened upon it suddenly from a niche in one of the upper corridors.  In Moorish days the ladies of the harem had been wont to go there unseen to see the reception of ambassadors of state, and such ceremonies, at which, even veiled, they could never be present.

He only stayed a few moments, and though his eyes were eager, it was by habit rather than because they were searching for any one in the crowd.  It pleased him now and then to see the court world as a spectacle, as it delights the hard-worked actor to be for once a spectator at another’s play.  He was an integral part of the court himself, a man of whom most was often expected when he had the least to give, to whom it was scarcely permitted to say anything in ordinary language, but to whom almost any license of familiar speech was freely allowed.  He was not a man, he was a tradition, a thing that had to be where it was from generation to generation; wherever the court had lived a jester lay buried, and often two and three, for they rarely lived an ordinary lifetime.  Adonis thought of that sometimes, when he was alone, or when he looked down at the crowd of delicately scented and richly dressed men and women, every one called by some noble name, who would doubtless laugh at some jest of his before the night was over.  To their eyes the fool was a necessary servant, because there had always been a fool at court; he was as indispensable as a chief butler, a chief cook, or a state coachman, and much more amusing.  But he was not a man, he had no name, he had no place among men, he was not