He glanced at me with a mild austerity and again lowered his eyes.  I cannot now but wonder how the rhythm of a voice so soft, so monotonous, could give such pleasure to the ear.  I almost doubted my own eyes when I looked upon his yellow, on that unmoved, sad, mad, pale face.

I had no doubt of his dogs, however, and walked scarcely at ease beside him, while they, shadow-footed, closely followed us at heel.

“Prince Ennui” conducted me with shining lantern into a dense orchard thickly under-grown, marvellously green, with a small, hard fruit upon its branches, shaped like a medlar, of a crisp, sweet odour and, despite its hardness, a delicious taste.  The interwoven twigs of the stooping trees were thickly nested; a veritable wilderness of moonlike and starry flowers ran all to seed amid the nettles and nightshade of this green silence.  And while I ate—­for I was hungry enough—­Prince Ennui stood, his hand on Sallow’s muzzle, lightly thridding the dusky labyrinths of the orchard with his faint green eyes.

Mine, too, were not less busy, but rather with its lord than with his orchard.  And the strange thought entered my mind, Was he in very deed the incarnation of this solitude, this silence, this lawless abundance?  Somewhere, in the green heats of summer, had he come forth, taken shape, exalted himself?  What but vegetable ichor coursed through veins transparent as his?  What but the swarming mysteries of these thick woods lurked in his brain?  As for his hounds, theirs was the same stealth, the same symmetry, the same cold, secret unhumanity as his.  Creatures begotten of moonlight on silence they seemed to me, with instincts past my workaday wits to conceive.

And Rosinante!  I laughed softly to think of her staid bones beside the phantom creature this prince had called up to me at mention of “Twilight.”

I ate because I was ravenously hungry, but also because, while eating, I was better at my ease.

Suddenly out of the stillness, like an arrow, Safte was gone; and far away beneath the motionless leaves a faint voice rang dwindling into silence.  I shuddered at my probable fate.

Prince Ennui glanced lightly.  “When the magic horn at last resounds,” he said, “how strange a flight it will be!  These thorny briers encroach ever nearer on my palace walls.  I am a captive ever less at ease.  Summer by summer the sun rises shorn yet closer of his beams, and now the lingering transit of the moon is but from one wood by a narrow crystal arch to another.  They will have me yet, sir.  How weary will the sleepy ones be of my uneasy footfall!”

And even as Safte slipped softly back to his watching mate, the patter and shrill menace of voices behind him hinted not all was concord between these hidden multitudes and their unseemly prince.

The master-stars shone earlier here; already sparkling above the tower was a canopy of clearest darkness spread, while the leafy fringes of the sky glowed yet with changing fires.