And Gonfal, without moving, sighed stupendously, and answered: “To me, madame, they will be bringing bitter gifts. For, whosoever wins in this quest, I lose: and whatsoever he may bring to you, to me he brings disseverance from content, and to me he brings a poignant if brief period of loneliness before you decide to have my head off.”
Now she caressed that head maternally. “Why, but what a notion!” said Morvyth, now that the man himself spoke of the nearing social duty whose imminence had for some while been fretting her. “As if, sweetheart, I would ever think of such a thing!”
“Undoubtedly, that will happen, madame. Marriage entails many obligations, not all of them pleasant. Queens in particular have to preserve appearances, they have to ensure the discretion of those whom they have trusted.”
“That,” she said, sorrowfully, “is what the dear old Imaun has been telling me,—lately, you know. And Masu talks about what a married woman owes to religion and setting a fine moral example.”
Then Gonfal, still smiling up at her, went on: “And yet it seems an odd thing, delight of my delights, that I shall leave you—for the headsman,—without any real regret. For I am content. While my shrewd fellows rode about the world to seek and to attain to power and wisdom, I have elected, as an unpractical realist, to follow after beauty. I have followed, to be sure, in the phrase of that absurd young Grimauc, at a paid price, yet, at that price, I have won, maimed and foredoomed, to beauty. And I am content.”
The Queen put on the proper air of diffidence. “But what, my friend, what, after all, is mere beauty?”
And he replied with the neatness which she always rather distrusted. “Beauty, madame, is Morvyth. It is not easy to describe either of these most dear and blinding synonyms, as how many reams of ruined paper attest!”
She waited, still stroking him: and in her mind was the old question, whether it was possible that, even now, this man was laughing at her?
She said: “But would it not grieve you unendurably, sweetheart, to see me the wife of another man? And so, would it not be really a kindness—?”
But the obtuse fellow did not chivalrously aid in smoothing her way to that nearing social duty. Instead, he replied, oddly enough: