But in the night a storm swept down the mountain pass with sudden fury, uprooting trees a century old, and rending mighty rocks with sword thrusts of its lightning.  And when it passed Aldebaran lay prone upon the earth borne down by rocks and fallen trees.  Lay as if dead until two passing goat-herds found him and bore him down in pity to their hut.

Long weeks went by before the fever craze and pains began to leave him, and when at last he crawled out in the sun, he found himself a poor misshapen thing, all maimed and marred, with twisted back and face all drawn awry, and foot that dragged.  One hand hung nerveless by his side.  Never more would it be strong enough to use the Sword.  He could not even draw it from its scabbard.

As in a daze he looked upon himself, thinking some hideous nightmare had him in its hold.  “This is not I!” he cried, in horror at the thought.  Then as the truth began to pierce his soul, he sat with starting eyes and lips that gibbered in cold fear, the while they still persisted in their fierce denial.  “This is not I!”

Again he said it and again as if his frenzied words could work a miracle and make him as he was before.  Then when the sickening sense of his calamity swept over him like a flood in all its fulness, he cast himself upon the earth and prayed to die.  Despair had seized him.  But Death comes not at such a call; kind Death, who waits that one may have a chance to rise again and grapple with the foe that downed him, and conquering, wipe the stigma coward from his soul.

So with Aldebaran.  At first it seemed that he could not endure to face the round of useless days now stretching out before him.  An eagle, broken-winged and drooping in a cage, he sat within the goat-herd’s hut and gloomed upon his lot, and cursed the vital force within that would not let him die.

To fall asleep with all the world within one’s grasp and waken empty-handed—­that is small bane to one who may spring up again, and by sheer might wrest all his treasures back from Fortune.  But to wake helpless as well as empty-handed, the strength for ever gone from arms that were invincible; to crawl, a poor crushed worm, the mark for all men’s pity, where one had thought to win the meed of all men’s praise, ah, then to live is agony!  Each breath becomes a venomed adder’s sting.

Most of all Aldebaran thought of Vesta.  The stroke that marred his comeliness and took his strength had robbed him of all power to win his happiness.  It was written “by the hearth of him who is the bravest she shall keep eternal vigil.”  As yet he had not risen above the level of his forbears’ bravery, only up to it.  Now ’twas impossible to show the world a greater courage, shorn as he was of strength.  And even had her horoscope willed otherwise, and she should come to him all filled with maiden pity to share his ruined hearth, he could not say her yea.  His man’s pride rose up in