She had moved so lightly over the thick grasses—he was steeped so heavily in his stupor—that he did not know of her approach until she spoke. Then Robert raised his heavy, weary head and stared at her, dazed, while she looked sadly at the twisted visage of the fool. Then consciousness came back to Robert, and he knew Perpetua, and his heart rejoiced within him.
“You! you!” he cried, hopefully. “Do you not know me?”
Perpetua looked pitifully at the ill-favored face. Who that had once seen it could fail to remember it, she thought; so she answered, gently,
“Indeed I do.”
Robert rose stiffly to his feet and held out his hands to her eagerly. In the moonlight his face seemed to her more hideous than even she had thought it in the morning, and she drew away from him involuntarily, but he paid no heed to this, thinking only of her words.
“Ah, Heaven be praised!” he sighed. “You know I am the King.”
Instantly Perpetua remembered the fool’s tale of the morning—how he had played at being the King and was menaced with death for his mimicry. She felt sure that the moon had overthrown his weak wits, and that he had now come to believe, in his madness, that he was, indeed, the King. But Robert plied her eagerly.
“You remember,” he insisted, “a while ago, in the sunlight, how I told you who I was? I am the King.”