"You are always a fool, Phratos," she said; "but it shall be as you fancy."
And she went in out of the moonlit leaves and the clear cool, autumn night into the little dark stifling tent, where the new-born child had been laid away in a corner upon a rough-and-ready bed of gathered dusky fir-needles.
"It is a little cub, not worth the saving; and its dam was not of our people," she said to herself, as she lifted the wailing and alien creature to her bosom.
"It is for you, my angel, that I do it," she murmured, looking at the sleeping face of her own son.
Outside the tent the sweet strains of Phratos's music rose sighing and soft; and mingling, as sounds mingle in a dream, with the murmurs of the forest leaves and the rushing of the mountain-river. He gave her the only payment in his power.
Zarâ, hushing the strange child at her breast, listened, and was half touched, half angered.
"Why should he play for this little stray thing, when he never played once for you, my glory?" she said to her son, as she put the dead woman's child roughly away, and took him up in its stead, to beat together in play his rosy hands and cover his mouth with kisses.
For even from these, the world's outcasts, this new life of a few hours' span was rejected as unworthy and despised.
Nevertheless, the music played on through the still forest night; and nevertheless, the child grew and throve.
The tribe of Taric abode in the Liebana or in the adjacent country along the banks of the Deva during the space of four years and more, scarcely losing in that time the sight, either from near or far, of the rosy peaks of the Europa.