courtesy in his low voice.

"Back, Safte!--back, Sallow!" he cried softly to his hounds; "is this
your civility? Indeed, sir," he continued to me, "it was all I could
do to dissuade the creatures from giving tongue when you first
appeared on the terrace of my solitary gardens. I heard too the
water-sprite: she only sings when footsteps stray upon the banks." He
smiled wanly, and his nose seemed even sharper in his pale face, and
his yellow hair leaner about his shoulders. "I feared her voice might
prove too persuasive, and deprive me of the first strange face I have
seen these many decades gone."

I bowed and murmured an apology for my intrusion, just as I might
perhaps to some apparition of nightmare that over-stayed its welcome.

"I beseech you, sir," he replied, "say no more! It may be I deemed you
at first a visitor perchance even more welcome--if it be possible,...
yet I know not that either. My name is Ennui,"--he smiled
again--"Prince Ennui. You have, perchance, heard somewhere our sad
story. This is the perpetual silence wherein lies that once-happy
princess, my dear sister, Sleeping Beauty."

His voice seemed but an echo amongst the walls and arches of this old
house, and he spoke with a suave enunciation as if in an unfamiliar
tongue.

I replied that I had read the ever-lovely story of Sleeping Beauty,
indeed knew it by heart, and assured him modestly that I had not the
least doubt of a happy ending--"that is, if the author be the least
authority."