"My little Miguel, I paint the world as the Eternal Father made it. The
laws of the place are written large, so that all may read them; and we
know that every road, whether it be my trodden path or some byway through
your gayer meadows, yet leads in the end to God. We have our choice,--or
to come to Him as a laborer comes at evening for the day's wages fairly
earned, or to come as a roisterer haled before the magistrate."

"I consider you to be in the right," the boy said, after a lengthy
interval, "although I decline--and decline emphatically--to believe you."

The Prince laughed. "There spoke Youth," he said, and he sighed as
though he were a patriarch. "But we have sung, we two, the Eternal
Tenson of God's will and of man's desires. And I claim the prize, my
Little Miguel."

Suddenly the page kissed one huge hand. "You have conquered, my very
dull and very glorious Prince. Concerning that Hawise--" But Miguel de
Rueda choked. "Oh, I do not understand! and yet in part I understand!"
the boy wailed in the darkness.

And the Prince laid one hand upon his page's hair, and smiled in the
darkness to note how soft was this hair, since the man was less a fool
than at first view you might have taken him to be; and he said:

"One must play the game out fairly, my lad. We are no little people,
she and I, the children of many kings, of God's regents here on earth;
and it was never reasonable, my Miguel, that gentlefolk should cheat at
their dicing."

The same night Miguel de Rueda repeated the prayer which Saint Theophilus