“He might have sat there before, if he had chosen,” mused Ranulph. Padraig was silent. Matteo had fallen beside the Carocchio, and his heart was sad.
Tomaso laid a hand on Ranulph’s shoulder.
“An empire is a forest of slow nurture, beloved of my soul,” he said gently, “and it does—not—grow—by—conflagrations.”
Transcriber’s Notes:
The following corrections have been made:
On page 46/47 two paragraphs were joined together. ([He answered, a trifle defiantly, “Perhaps I do.])
On page 239 the quotation marks were moved from the end of the stanza to the beginning of the next, ([Take a chance for Belphoebe’s fame!) (“They live in Valhalla)].
Spelling and pagenumbers in the Tables of Contents and Illustrations, and in the captions, have been corrected to match the rest of the book.
Otherwise the original has been preserved, including archaic, unusual and inconsistent spelling, especially in the poems, and inconsistent hyphenation.