King:  (With a roar.) Anyone to say that word again I will not leave a head on any neck in the kingdom!  I declare on my oath it would be best for me to take the world for my pillow and put that lad upon the throne!

(Queen goes back frightened to door.)

Gateman:  (Coming in.) There is a man coming in that will take no denial.  It is Fintan the Astrologer.

(Fintan enters with Dall Glic, Nurse, Princess, Taig, Manus and Prince of the Marshes crowding after him.)

King:  Another disturbance!  The whole world would seem to be on the move!

Queen:  Fintan!  What brings him here again?

Fintan:  A great deceit?  A terrible deception!

King:  What at all is it?

Fintan:  Long and all as I’m in the world, such a thing never happened in my lifetime!

Queen:  What is it has happened?

Fintan:  It is not any fault of myself or any miscounting of my own!  I am certain sure of that much.  Is it that the stars of heaven are gone astray, they that are all one with a clock—­unless it might be on a stormy night when they are wild-looking around the moon.

King:  Go on with your story and stop your raving.

Fintan:  The first time ever I came to this place I made a prophecy.

Dall Glic:  You did, about the child was in the cradle.

Fintan:  And that was but new in the world.  It is what I said, that she was born under a certain star, and that in a score of years all but two, whatever acting was going on in that star at the time she was born, she would get her crosses in the same way.

Dall Glic:  The cross you foretold to her was to be ate by a Dragon.  You laid down it would come upon a twelvemonth from this very day.

Fintan:  That’s it.  That was according to my reckoning.  There was no mistake in that.  And I thought better of the Seven Stars than they to make a fool of me, after all the respect I had showed them, giving my life to watching themselves and the plans they have laid down for men and for mortals.

King:  It seems as if I myself was the best prophet and that there is no Dragon at all.

Fintan:  What a bad opinion you have of me that I would be so far out as that!  It would be a deception and a disappointment out of measure, there to come no Dragon, and I after foretelling and prophesying him.

King:  Troth, it would be no disappointment at all to ourselves.

Fintan:  It would be better, I tell you, a score of king’s daughters to be ate and devoured, than the high stars in their courses to be proved wrong.  But it must be right, it surely must be right.  I gave the prophecy according to her birth hour, that was one hour before the falling back of the sun.

Dall Glic:  It was not, but an hour before the rising of the sun.