"Passer by, lower your eyes, that you may not have to say, 'Alas! alas!
woe is me, for I have seen the angel of the Lord.'"

The villagers tremblingly knelt with their faces to the round. And
several of them used to say that angels, whom it would be death to see,
passed along the roads of the island in the night time.

Kraken did not know of the loves of Orberosia and Marcel, for he was a
hero, and heroes never discover the secrets of their wives. But though
he did not know of these loves, he reaped the benefit of them. Every
night he found his companion more good-humoured and more beautiful,
exhaling pleasure and perfuming the nuptial bed with a delicious odour
of fennel and vervain. She loved Kraken with a love that never became
importunate or anxious, because she did not rest its whole weight on him
alone.

This lucky infidelity of Orberosia was destined soon to save the hero
from a great peril and to assure his fortune and his glory for ever.
For it happened that she saw passing in the twilight a neatherd from
Belmont, who was goading on his oxen, and she fell more deeply in
love with him than she had ever been with the shepherd Marcel. He was
hunch-backed; his shoulders were higher than his ears; his body was
supported by legs of different lengths; his rolling eyes flashed, from
beneath his matted hair. From his throat issued a hoarse voice and
strident laughter; he smelt of the cow-shed. However, to her he was
beautiful. "A plant," as Gnatho says, "has been loved by one, a stream
by another, a beast by a third."

Now, one day, as she was sighing within the neatherd's arms in a village
barn, suddenly the blasts of a trumpet, with sounds and footsteps, fell