“And what is that one prayer?” asked the Wanderer.  “I knew the song long ago, but I have never guessed what that magic prayer can be like.”

“It must be a woman’s prayer; I cannot tell you what it is.”

“And are you so sad to-day, Unorna?  What makes you sing that song?”

“Sad?  No, I am not sad,” she answered with an effort.  “But the words rose to my lips and so I sang.”

“They are pretty words,” said her companion, almost indifferently.  “And you have a very beautiful voice,” he added thoughtfully.

“Have I?  I have been told so, sometimes.”

“Yes.  I like to hear you sing, and talk, too.  My life is a blank.  I do not know what it would be without you.”

“I am little enough to—­those who know me,” said Unorna, growing pale, and drawing a quick breath.

“You cannot say that.  You are not little to me.”

There was a long silence.  He gazed at the plants, and his glance wandered from one to the other, as though he did not see them, being lost in meditation.  The voice had been calm and clear as ever, but it was the first time he had ever said so much, and Unorna’s heart stood still, half fire and half ice.  She could not speak.

“You are very much to me,” he said again, at last.  “Since I have been in this place a change has come over me.  I seem to myself to be a man without an object, without so much as a real thought.  Keyork tells me that there is something wanting, that the something is woman, and that I ought to love.  I cannot tell.  I do not know what love is, and I never knew.  Perhaps it is the absence of it that makes me what I am—­a body and an intelligence without a soul.  Even the intelligence I begin to doubt.  What sense has there ever been in all my wanderings?  Why have I been in every place, in every city?  What went I forth to see?  Not even a reed shaken by the wind!  I have spoken all languages, read thousands of books, known men in every land—­and for what?  It is as though I had once had an object in it all, though I know that there was none.  But I have realised the worthlessness of my life since I have been here.  Perhaps you have shown it to me, or helped me to see it.  I cannot tell.  I ask myself again and again what it was all for, and I ask in vain.  I am lonely, indeed, in the world, but it has been my own choice.  I remember that I had friends once, when I was younger, but I cannot tell what has become of one of them.  They wearied me, perhaps, in those days, and the weariness drove me from my own home.  For I have a home, Unorna, and I fancy that when old age gets me at last I shall go there to die, in one of those old towers by the northern sea.  I was born there, and there my mother died and my father, before I knew them; it is a sad place!  Meanwhile, I may have thirty years, or forty, or even more to live.  Shall I go on living this wandering, aimless life?  And if not what shall I do?  Love, says Keyork Arabian—­who never loved anything but himself, but to whom that suffices, for it passes the love of woman!”