“I have loved a number of women, madame,—although I have of course avoided giving rise to any regrettable scandal. And it has been very pleasant to love women without annoying the prejudices of their recognized and legitimate proprietors. It enables one to combine physical with mental exercise. But this is not pleasant. To the contrary, I am frightened. I am become as a straw in a wide and rapid river: I am indulging in no pastime: that which is stronger than I can imagine is hurrying me toward that of which I am ignorant.”
“I know,” she answered. “Time upon time it has been so with us. But something has gone wrong—”
“What has happened, madame, is that the Sylan is at odds with me; and covets, so my dactyliomancy informed me, some one thing or it may be two things which I possess.”
“The Sylan is about to become human. That is why your saga has been perverted, and that is the reason of your having been ensnared as a phantom into the Sylan’s House—”
“Eh, then, and do you also, madame, dismiss me as a phantom!”
“Why, but of course no person’s body may enter into this mischancy place! The body which I have to-day, my appointed lover, is that of a very old woman in Cataia, nodding among my body’s many children and grandchildren, and dreaming of the love this life has denied to me. It is a blotched and shriveled body, colored like a rotting apple: and the bodies which we now have may not ever encounter. So all our living wears thin, and the lives that we now have must both be wasted tepidly, as a lukewarm water is poured out: and there is now no help for it, now that the Sylan is at odds with you.”
“I go to match my thaumaturgies against his magic,” said Guivric stoutly.
“You go, my dearest, to face that thing which is most pitiable and terrible of all things that be! You go to face your own destruction!”
“Nevertheless,” said Guivric, “I go.”
Yet still he looked at this woman. And Guivric’s thin hard lips moved restively. He sighed. He turned away and went on silently. His face could not be seen under his cap of owl feathers, but his broad shoulders sagged a little.