“It must be such an adventure. It must make you hold your breath and your heart beat.”
John wondered grimly whether a certain doer of wickedness had felt this ecstatic rapture. She, too, must have seen the gray dawn, but creeping through prison-bars into her cell. God of Inscrutability! Was it possible that these two co-watchers of the dawn, both so dominant in his life, were of the same race of beings? If the one was a woman born of woman, what in the name of mystery was Stellamaris?
“Don't look so grave, Great High Belovedest,” she said, squeezing a finger. “I only spoke in fun. It must really be horrid to be wicked. When I was little I had a book about Cruel Frederick—I think it belonged to grandmama. It had awful pictures, and there were rhymes—
He tore the wings off little flies,
And then poked out their little eyes.
And there was a picture of his doing so. I used to think him a detestable boy. It made me unhappy and kept me awake when I was quite small, but now I know it's all nonsense. People don't do such things, do they?”
Risca twisted his glum face into a smile, remembering the Unwritten Law. “Of course not, Stellamaris,” said he. “Cruel Frederick is just as much of a mythical personage as the Giant Fee-fo-fum, who said:
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
And be he alive or be he dead,
I 'll grind his bones to make my bread.”