The title which stands at the head of this story is not my own. It
belongs to one whose name must come very often into that which I
have to tell, for it is through him that I am what I may be, and it
is because of him that there is anything worth telling of my doings
at all. Hereafter it will be seen, as I think, that I could do no
less than set his name in the first place in some way, if indeed
the story must be mostly concerning myself. Maybe it will seem
strange that I, a South Saxon of the line of Ella, had aught at all
to do with a West Welshman--a Cornishman, that is--of the race and
line of Arthur, in the days when the yet unforgotten hatred between
our peoples was at its highest; and so it was in truth, at first.
Not so much so was it after the beginning, however. It would be
stranger yet if I were not at the very outset to own all that is
due from me to him. Lonely was I when he first came to me, and
lonely together, in a way, have he and I been for long years that
for me, at least, have had no unhappiness in them, for we have been
all to each other.

I have said that I was lonely when he first came to me, and I must
tell how that was. I suppose that the most lonesome place in the
world is the wide sea, and after that a bare hilltop; but next to
these in loneliness I would set the glades of a beech forest in
midwinter silence, when the snow lies deep on the ground under
boughs that are too stiff to rustle in the wind, and the birds are
dumb, and the ice has stilled the brooks. Set a lost child amid the
bare grey tree trunks of such a winter forest, in the dead silence
of a great frost, with no track near him but that which his own
random feet have made across the snow, and I think that there can
be nought lonelier than he to be thought of: and in the depth of
the forest there is peril to the lonely.