“Continue, mon cher!  Continue!  I can see them also!” Max, utterly absorbed, charming as a child, bent forward, staring into the heart of the fire.

“Well, they mount and mount and mount, and sometimes the great horses refuse the craggy path and rear, and sometimes a knight is unseated and the others look back and laugh at his discomfiture and ride on until they themselves are proved unfit; and so, on and on, while the way gets steeper and more perilous, and the company smaller and still smaller, until the sun drops down behind the mountain and the gold flag flutters as gray as a moth, and in all the windows of the castle torches spring up to greet the knight who shall succeed.”

“And which is he—­the knight who shall succeed?”

“Don’t you see him?”

“No!  Where is he?  Where?”

“Why, there—­riding first, on the narrowest verge of the craggy path!  A very young knight with dark hair and a proud carriage and gray eyes with flecks of gold in them.”

For an instant Max gazed seriously into the flames, then turned, blushing and laughing.

“Ah!  But you are laughing at me!  What a shame!  For a punishment you shall go straight back to work.”  He jumped up and handed Blake his discarded hammer.

Blake looked reluctantly at the hammer, then looked back at the enticing flame of the logs.

“Oh, very well!  Have it your own way!” he said, getting slowly to his feet.  “But if I were you, I’d like to have heard what awaited the knight in the tapestried chamber of the castle tower!”

CHAPTER XIII

To the zest of the amateur, Blake added knowledge of a practical kind in the arrangement of household gods, and long ere the February dusk had fallen, the fifth-floor appartement had assumed a certain homeliness.  True, much of the ‘old iron,’ as he termed the coppers and brasses for which Max had bartered in the rue Andre de Sarte, still encumbered the floor, and most of the windows cried aloud for covering; but the little salon was habitable, and in the bedroom once occupied by Madame Salas a bed and a dressing-table stood forth, fresh and enticing enough to suggest a lady’s chamber, while over the high window white serge curtains shut out the cold.

At seven o’clock, having torn the canvas wrappings from the last chair, the two workers paused in their labors by common consent and looked at each other by the uncertain light of half a dozen candles stuck into bowls and vases in various corners of the salon.

“Boy,” said Blake, breaking what had been a long silence, “I tell you what it is, you’re done!  Take a warm by the fire for a minute, while I tub under the kitchen tap, then we’ll fare forth for a meal and a breath of air!”

Max, who had worked with fierce zeal if little knowledge, made no protest.  His face was pale, and he moved with a certain slow weariness.