"The hermit of Mount Aventine?" Tristan queried.
"Even he! He has a strange craze, a doctrine of the End of Time, to be accomplished when the cycle of the sæculum has run its course. A doctrine he most furiously proclaims in language seemingly inspired, and which he promulgates to farther his own dark ends."
"A theory most dark and strange," Tristan replied with a shudder, for he was far from free of the superstition of the times.
Basil gave a shrug. His tone was lurid.
"What shall it matter to us, who shall hardly tread this earth when the fateful moment comes?"
"If it were true nevertheless?" Tristan replied meditatively.
A sombre fire burnt in the eyes of the Grand Chamberlain.
"Then, indeed, should we not pluck the flowers in our path, defying darkness and death and the fiery chariot of the All-destroyer that is to sweep us to our doom?"
Tristan shuddered.
Some such words he had indeed heard among the pilgrim throngs without clearly grasping their import. They had haunted his memory and had, for the time at least, laid a restraining hand upon his impulses.