was deep they waited with held breath; when it somewhat lifted they
sorrowed that the tide had brought him back. He was of those
changelings from a fortunate land to whom Love clings when Faith has
covered her head and turned away. They that in heaviness of heart loved
him still grieved that he might not touch the dark shore. Better, far
better, to lay hold of it so, to go quietly in the not unhappy
fever-dream, wandering of old days, recking naught of the new. So the
matter might be adjudged elsewhere, but in this world glozed
and softened.

The days went on and still Fate played with him, drew him forward,
plucked him back. What fancies he had; what wild excursions he made into
dizzy, black, and horror-haunted regions; what æons he lived beneath the
seas that stifled; by what winds he was whirled, through space, past
burning orbs that neither warmed nor lighted the all-surrounding night;
in what Titanic maze he was lost, lost forever, he and Pain that was his
brother from whom he might not part;--the sick brain made a hell and
languished in the world it had created! At other times, when the dark
coasts were near and the current very swift, pale paradises opened to
him where he lay for centuries, nor hot nor cold, neither waking nor
sleeping, not in joy and not in sorrow. Then the stopped pendulum swung
again, and the dreams came fast and faster. At times his brain turned
from its mad clash with gigantic, formless, elemental things to rest in
the beaten ways. They that listened heard the adventurer speak, heard
the courtier and the poet and the lover, but never once the traitor. Of
the fortress of Nueva Cordoba and of what had happened therein, of a
Spaniard, noble but in name, of an English knight and leader who had not
endured, who, where many a simple soul had stood fast to the end, had
redeemed his body with his honor, the man who raved of all things else
made no mention. Now with the sugared and fantastic protestation