Bertha Kircher smiled a trifle dubiously. "I could not tell it," she said, "from lamb or veal."
"No," said the woman, "it tastes as good to me. But these lions are very carefully kept and very carefully fed and their flesh is so seasoned and prepared that it might be anything so far as taste is concerned."
And so Bertha Kircher broke her long fast upon strange fruits, lion meat, and goat's milk.
Scarcely had she finished when again the door opened and there entered a yellow-coated soldier. He spoke to the old woman.
"The king," she said, "has commanded that you be prepared and brought to him. You are to share these apartments with me. The king knows that I am not like his other women. He never would have dared to put you with them. Herog XVI has occasional lucid intervals. You must have been brought to him during one of these. Like the rest of them he thinks that he alone of all the community is sane, but more than once I have thought that the various men with whom I have come in contact here, including the kings themselves, looked upon me as, at least, less mad than the others. Yet how I have retained my senses all these years is beyond me."
"What do you mean by prepare?" asked Bertha Kircher. "You said that the king had commanded I be prepared and brought to him."
"You will be bathed and furnished with a robe similar to that which I wear."
"Is there no escape?" asked the girl. "Is there no way even in which I can kill myself?"
The woman handed her the fork. "This is the only way," she said, "and you will notice that the tines are very short and blunt."
The girl shuddered and the old woman laid a hand gently upon her shoulder. "He may only look at you and send you away," she said. "Ago XXV sent for me once, tried to talk with me, discovered that I could not understand him and that he could not understand me, ordered that I be taught the language of his people, and then apparently forgot me for a year. Sometimes I do not see the king for a long period. There was one king who ruled for five years whom I never saw. There is always hope; even I whose very memory has doubtless been forgotten beyond these palace walls still hope, though none knows better how futilely."