"You are not beautiful," were the words that sounded to her from all sides—out of the wood, the water, out of her own heart-beats. Night came by gently, and sought her darling whom she had ever kissed asleep. She only found Sorrow, and looked at her gloomily.
"What have you done to my Peace?" she asked, in threatening tones.
"I have fetched him away," moaned Sorrow, and wrung her hands.
Night frowned yet more darkly.
"In punishment," she said, "you shall ever seek him and never find him. Now go!"
Sorrow went forth like to a moaning wind that rushes through the trees. She wanted to seek for Peace in the world. For a long, long while she never visited Mother Patience, for she now only thought of one and had forgotten the good mother. Peace hovered over the world as a bird, and he beheld how Strife and his children had devastated it. He saw bloody battlefields, and at sight of the first corpse he grew so giddy that he was near to fall down with awe. When he beheld murder his heart grew sore in his breast, as though he had himself been wounded, and he flew on, away from the scene.
He flew over a great city. There he saw a light burning in an attic window. He looked in. A pale man sat there, and coughed and wrote with long white fingers.
"And I, too, shall be great, ay, surely," he murmured to himself. "I feel it in my breast like fire; there is a light in my brain that shall illumine the world."
"Poor fool," thought Peace; "Ambition is hunting you to death and you do not know it."
From out a vine-wreathed window there gazed a lovely girlish head.