She did not understand; but her face lost its color, her heart sunk, her lips closed. She went on, treading down the long coils of the wild strawberries and the heavy grasses wet with the dew.
The glow from the west died, a young moon rose, the fields and the skies grew dark.
He looked, and let her go;—alone.
In her, Hermes, pitiful for once, had given him a syrinx through which all sweetest and noblest music might have been breathed. But Hermes, when he gives such a gift, leaves the mortal on whom he bestows it to make or to miss the music as he may; and to Arslàn, his reed was but a reed as the rest were—a thing that bloomed for a summer-eve—a thing of the stagnant water and drifting sand—a thing that lived by the breath of the wind—a thing that a man should cut down and weave in a crown for a day, and then cast aside on the stream, and neither regret nor in any wise remember—a reed of the river, as the rest were.
BOOK V.
CHAPTER I.
"Only a little gold!" he thought, one day, looking on the cartoon of the Barabbas. "As much as I have flung away on a dancing-woman, or the dancing-woman on the jewel for her breast. Only a little gold, and I should be free; and with me these."
The thought escaped him unawares in broken words, one day, when he thought himself alone.