“You are nineteen and a young king and know naught about it!” said Morgen Fay. She took her seat by the small fire on the hearth and he sat opposite. He had no amorous passion for her and she knew it. Once she would have set herself to making him find it. Now she did not care. She had not cared once this year. She felt no amorous movement toward him, but she liked him. She was thirty-two. Now, sitting there, she could have said “Son—”
He nursed his knee, looking now at the blue and red flames and now at Morgen Fay.
“To get back a gay heart why not go to Saint Leofric’s?”
“I don’t believe in miracles. If they are, they are for others, not for me.”
“Why don’t you believe?”
“I don’t know. I know a deal of Morgen Fay and there’s a deal I do not know. But neither what I know nor what I do not know creeps and prays to a dead man’s bones. All that to me is a mockery! I laugh at it and against it. Some are healed? Doubtless! Many! But believed they so of it, a rose in my garden, so they smelled it, kissed it, believed it was rooted in Paradise, would heal them! They heal themselves. Believing! Believing! I would that I had it. So easy to cure one’s self! Oh, the self is the wonder that is so dark and is so bright, so strong and so feeble!”
She looked at him sombrely, hunger in her face.
“If you said all that outside—”
“Aye, indeed, if I said it! Morgen Fay that has ’scaped sheet and candle all these years might have them now, but for a different reason! I’ll not say it outside—nor inside on a different day. To-day I would tell the truth, for there is no sparkle in lying!”