"Ay, little heart, and a great sinner to boot"
"I ikes great tingers. Ting one a tory."
Clement chanted a child's story in a sort of recitative. The boy listened with rapture, and presently succumbed to sleep.
Clement began to rock his new treasure in his arms, and to crone over him a little lullaby well known in Tergon, with which his own mother had often set him off.
He sighed deeply, and could not help thinking what might have been but for a piece of paper with a lie in it.
The next moment the moonlight burst into his cell, and with it, and in it, Margaret Brandt was down at his knee with a timorous hand upon his shoulder.
"Gerald, you do not reject us. You cannot."
The hermit stared from the child to her in throbbing amazement.
"Us?" he gasped at last.
Margaret was surprised in her turn.