"You said you would not come till I had taken the world by the shoulders," gasped Leo, falling back.
"I always keep my word. You have done that three times, with three songs. What more do you desire?"
"Let me live to see the world know it," pleaded Leo. "Let me be sure that my songs——"
"Make men brave?" said the Crab. "Even then there would be one man who was afraid. The Girl was braver than you are. Come."
Leo was standing close to the restless, insatiable mouth. "I forgot," said he, simply. "The Girl was braver. But I am a God too, and I am not afraid."
"What is that to me?" said the Crab.
Then Leo's speech was taken from him, and he lay still and dumb, watching Death till he died.
Leo was the last of the Children of the Zodiac. After his death there sprang up a breed of little mean men, whimpering and flinching and howling because the Houses killed them and theirs, who wished to live forever without any pain. They did not increase their lives, but they increased their own torments miserably, and there were no Children of the Zodiac to guide them, and the greater part of Leo's songs were lost.
Only he had carved on the Girl's tombstone the last verse of the Song of the Girl, which stands at the head of this story.
One of the children of men, coming thousands of years later, rubbed away the lichen, read the lines, and applied them to a trouble other than the one Leo meant. Being a man, men believed that he had made the verses himself; but they belong to Leo, the Child of the Zodiac, and teach, as he taught, that what comes or does not come, we must not be afraid.