After sunset there was a great banquet and after it a great ball, and the courtiers and princes were delighted by the beauty and grace of the new King.  He was much brighter and more charming than any of the King Mordreths had been.  His laugh was full of gaiety and the people who stood near him felt happier, though they did not know why.

But when the ball was at its height he stepped into the center of the room and spoke aloud to the splendid company.

“I have seen the broad streets and the palaces and all that is beautiful in my capital,” he said.  “Now I must go to the narrow streets and the dark ones.  I must see the miserable people, the cripples, the wretched ones, the drunkards and the thieves.”

Every one clamored and protested.  These things they had hidden from him; they said kings should not see them.

“I will see them,” he said with a smile which was beautiful and strange.  “I go now, on foot, and unattended except for my friend the Ancient One.  Let the ball go on.”

He strode through the glittering throng with the gray-clad Ancient One at his side.  He still wore his crown upon his head because he wished his people to know that their King had come to them.

Through dark and loathsome places they went, through narrow streets and back alleys and courts, where people scurried away like rats as the gutter children had done in the daytime.  King Amor could not have seen them but that he had brought with him a bright lantern and held it up in the air above his high head.  The light shining upon his beautiful face and his crown made him look more than ever like a young god and giant, and the people cowered terrified before him, asking each other what such a King would do to wretches like themselves.  But just a few very little children smiled at him because he was so young and bright and splendid.  No one in the black holes and corners could understand why a King should come walking among them on the night of his coronation day.  Most of them thought that the next morning he would order them all to be killed, and their houses burned, because he would only think of them as vermin.

Once as he passed through a dark court a madman darted out in his path shaking his fist.

“We hate you!” he cried out.  “We hate you!”

The dwellers in the court gasped with terror, wondering what would happen.  But the tall young King stood holding his lantern above his head and gazing at the madman with deep thought in his eyes.

“There is no time for hatred in the world,” he said.  “There is no time.”  And then he passed on.

The look of deep thought was in his face throughout the hours in which he strode on until he had seen all he had come to see.

The next day he rode back up the mountain to his castle on the crag, and when the night fell he lay out upon the battlements under the sky as he had done on so many nights.  The soft wind blew about him as he looked up at the stars.