“—For it appears,” said Kerin, “that, after all, only one thing is wholly true. I have found nowhere any other truth: and this one truth, revealed to us here, is a truth which nobody will blame the patriarch for omitting from his more widely circulated works. Nevertheless, I have copied out every word of it, upon this bit of paper, to show to and make glad the dear bright eyes of my young wife.”
But Sclaug replied, without looking at the proffered paper, “The truth does not matter to the dead, who have done with all endeavor, and who can change nothing.”
Then he told Kerin good-by; and Kerin opened the door out of which Sclaug was used to go in search of Sclaug’s little amusements. When Kerin had passed through this door he drew it to behind him: and in that instant the door vanished, and Kerin stood alone in a dim winter-wasted field, fingering no longer a copper door-knob but only the chill air.
Leafless elder-trees rose about him, not twenty paces before Kerin was the Well of Ogde: and beyond its dilapidated curbing, a good half of which somebody had heaved down into the well, he saw, through wintry twilight, the gray eight-sided house in which he had been used to live with the young Saraïde whom many called a witch.
47.
Economics of Saraïde
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KERIN went forward, beneath naked elder boughs, toward his dear home; and he saw coming out of the door of the gray house the appearance of a man who vaguely passed to the right hand of Kerin in the twilight. But a woman’s figure waited at the door; and Kerin, still going onward, came thus, in the November twilight, again to Saraïde.
“Who is that man?” said Kerin, first of all. “And what is he doing here?”
“Does that matter?” Saraïde answered him, without any outcry or other sign of surprise.