The Slow Mover spoke.
“Son!”
I was saved!
He had aught to say to me.
The spell was broken.
My heart began to beat again; the warm blood ran tingling through my veins.
It was a narrow escape.
Already my finger tips had cooled.
Another moment and I would have joined the throng of Slow Movers, and become a brother to the marble dwellers on the Sculptors’ Isle.
All that night the aged Slow Mover talked to me. And when the sun went up I knew all. I knew the secret which had so darkened his placid countenance. I knew the cave in which dwelt the hermit of the Sculptors’ Isle—an outcast, a prisoner, shut in between the narrow walls of a cavern by the sea, for no fault of his, for no sin, for no wrong.