"You lie," they said, "for even though you have hitched a body to your head we recognize you." They looked at Niafer, and all three laughed cruelly. "Was it for this hunched, draggled, mud-faced wench that you left us, you squinting old villain? And have you so soon forgotten the vintner's parlor at Neogréant, and what you did with the gold plates?"
"No, I have not forgotten these things, for I never knew anything about them," said Manuel.
Said one of the knaves, twirling fiercely his moustachios: "Hah, shameless Mimir, do you look at me, who have known you and your blind son Oriander, too, to be unblushing knaves for these nine centuries! Now, I suppose, you will be denying the affair of the squirrel also?"
"Oh, be off with your nonsense!" says Manuel, "for I have not yet had twenty-two years of living, and I never saw you before, and I hope never to see you again."
But they all set upon him with cutlasses, so there was nothing remaining save to have out his sword and fight. And when each of these one-eyed persons had vanished curiously under his death-wound, Manuel told Niafer it was a comfort to find that the month of years had left him a fair swordsman for all that his youth was gone; and that he thought they had better be leaving this part of the high woods of Dun Vlechlan, wherein unaccountable things took place, and all persons behaved unreasonably.
"Were these wood-spirits unreasonable," asks Niafer, "in saying that the countenance and the body you have given me are ugly?"
"My dear," replied Manuel, "it was their saying that which made me try to avoid the conflict, because it does not look well, not even in dealing with demons, to injure the insane."
"Manuel, and can it be you who are considering appearances?"
Dom Manuel said gravely: "My dealings with Misery and with Misery's kindred have taught me many things which I shall never forget nor very willingly talk about. One of these teachings, though, is that in most affairs there is a middle road on which there is little traffic and comparatively easy going. I must tell you that the company I have been in required a great deal of humoring, for of course it is not safe to trifle with any evil principle. No, no, one need not absolutely and openly defy convention, I perceive, in order to follow after one's own thinking," says Manuel, shrewdly, and waggling a gray beard.
"I am so glad you have learned that at last! At least, I suppose, I am glad," said Niafer, a little wistfully, as she recalled young Manuel of the high head.