"I think," said Master Nathaniel slowly, "he may have mishandled the sacred objects of the Mysteries."
"What are these sacred objects, Nat?"
Master Nathaniel moved uneasily in his chair, and said, with an embarrassed little laugh, "Life and death, I suppose." He hated being asked about these sorts of things.
Master Ambrose sat for a few moments pondering, and then he said, "It was curious how in all his attacks on you he defeated his own ends."
"Yes," cried Master Nathaniel, with much more animation than he had hitherto shown, "that was really very curious. Everything he did produced exactly the opposite effect he had intended it should. He feared the Chanticleers, and wanted to be rid of them, so he gets Ranulph off to Fairyland, whence nobody had ever before returned. And he manages to get me so discredited that I have to leave Lud, and he thinks me safely out of the way. But, in reality, he was only bringing about his own downfall. I have to leave Lud, and so I go to the farm, and there I find old Gibberty's incriminating document. While the fact of Ranulph's having gone off yonder sends me after him, and that is why, I suppose, I come back as Duke Aubrey's deputy," and again he gave an embarrassed laugh; and then added dreamily, "It is useless to try and circumvent the Duke."
"He who rides the wind needs must go where his steed carries him," quoted Master Ambrose.
Master Nathaniel smiled, and for some minutes they puffed at their pipes in silence.
Then Master Nathaniel gave a reminiscent chuckle: "Those were queer months that we lived through, Ambrose!" he cried. "All of us, that's to say those of us who had parts to play, seemed to be living each others' dreams or dreaming each others' lives, whichever way you choose to put it, and the most incongruous things began to rhyme—apples and bleeding corpses and trees and ghosts. Yes, all our dreams got entangled. Leer makes a speech about men and trees, and I find the solution of the situation under a herm, which is half a man and half a tree, and you see the juice of fairy fruit and think that it is the dead bleeding—and so on. Yes, my adventures went on getting more and more like a dream till ... the climax," and he paused abruptly.
A long silence followed, broken at last by Master Ambrose. "Well, Nat," he said, "I think I've had a lesson in humility. I used to have as good an opinion of myself as most men, I think, but now I've learned that I'm a very ordinary sort of fellow, made of very inferior clay to you and my Moonlove—all the things that you know at first hand and I can only take on faith."
"Suppose, Ambrose, that what we know at first hand is only this—that there is nothing to know?" said Master Nathaniel a little sadly. Then he sank into a brown study, and Master Ambrose, thinking he wanted to be alone, stole quietly from the room.