"Why, is it not the truth," asks Manuel of Alianora, speaking not very
steadily, "that you are to marry the man who restores the feather of
which you were robbed at the pool of Haranton? and can marry none
other?"

"It is the truth," she answered, in a small frightened lovely voice,
"and I no longer grieve that it is the truth, and I think it a most
impolite reason for your being miserable."

Manuel laughed without ardor. "See how we live and learn! I recall now
the droll credulity of a lad who watched a shining feather burned, while
he sat within arm's reach thinking about cabbage soup, because his grave
elders assured him that a feather could never be of any use to anybody.
And that, too, after he had seen what uses may be made of an old bridle
or of a duck egg or of anything! Well, but all water that is past the
dam must go its way, even though it be a flood of tears--"

Here Manuel gently shrugged broad shoulders. He took out of his pocket
the feather he had plucked from the wing of Ferdinand's goose.

He said: "A feather I took from you in the red autumn woods, and a
feather I now restore to you, my Princess, in this white palace of
yours, not asking any reward, and not claiming to be remembered by you
in the gray years to come, but striving to leave no obligation
undischarged and no debt unpaid. And whether in this world wherein
nothing is certain, one feather is better than another feather, I do not
know. It well may come about that I must straightway take a foul doom
from fair lips, and that presently my head will be drying on a silver
pike. Even so, one never knows: and I have learned that it is well to