labyrinths of the orchard with his faint green eyes.

Mine, too, were not less busy, but rather with its lord than with his
orchard. And the strange thought entered my mind, Was he in very deed
the incarnation of this solitude, this silence, this lawless
abundance? Somewhere, in the green heats of summer, had he come forth,
taken shape, exalted himself? What but vegetable ichor coursed through
veins transparent as his? What but the swarming mysteries of these
thick woods lurked in his brain? As for his hounds, theirs was the
same stealth, the same symmetry, the same cold, secret unhumanity as
his. Creatures begotten of moonlight on silence they seemed to me,
with instincts past my workaday wits to conceive.

And Rosinante! I laughed softly to think of her staid bones beside the
phantom creature this prince had called up to me at mention of
"Twilight."

I ate because I was ravenously hungry, but also because, while eating,
I was better at my ease.

Suddenly out of the stillness, like an arrow, Safte was gone; and far
away beneath the motionless leaves a faint voice rang dwindling into
silence. I shuddered at my probable fate.

Prince Ennui glanced lightly. "When the magic horn at last resounds,"
he said, "how strange a flight it will be! These thorny briers
encroach ever nearer on my palace walls. I am a captive ever less at
ease. Summer by summer the sun rises shorn yet closer of his beams,
and now the lingering transit of the moon is but from one wood by a
narrow crystal arch to another. They will have me yet, sir. How weary