In the morning, when the abbot came to milk his cow, he found Kophetua fast asleep on a heap of rushes beside his horse. Immediately he roused him.
"My son, my son," he cried, "what do you here? Why are you not beside your wife?"
The King sprang up, and rubbed his eyes. Then he stared a while hard at the hermit's eager face, till he could remember where he was.
"I have no wife," he said abruptly; and, striding past the hermit, he walked rapidly to the river, and, casting off his clothes, he leaped into the cool and sparkling water.
But even the heedless river could not bring back to him the cynical calm he had lost. The ancient mystery of the place hung on him still like a spell, and the river ran by behind him, laughing in lofty contempt, as he took his way back. No longer could he think as was his wont. The grim cliffs seemed to bar him from his old philosophy; and out of the dark holes in their face, which marked the deserted cells, seemed to come whisperings of thoughts long dead. The ghosts of all the sharp griefs and insane dreaming that had wafted men and women hither, age after age, in search of peace, streamed out like some unseen miasma, and compassed him about. How many had been whirled into this silent eddy in the great river of time before him to find or wait for the telling of the great secret that vexed their soul! It was all he could bring his thoughts to rest on. He felt about him, like a living presence, the spirit of a mysticism long since dead, and he could reason no more.
Suddenly he started to find himself face to face with the red-bearded hermit.
"What is this sin, my son? What is this lie?" cried the man, with unsteady anger in his eye and voice.
"It is no sin. It is no lie," answered Kophetua sharply. "She is not my wife. Last night she was, if ever man had wife. You yourself called her so, and I was sure you spoke a sudden truth; but to-day it is changed. You lied. She is not my wife. She shall not be my wife!"
He was conscious of speaking like a madman, but it was all he could find to say. The hermit was in no way troubled at his wild speech. It seemed the language he best understood.