Page:Cup of Gold-1929.djvu/157

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Cup of Gold

Old Robert rose to stretch himself. “Ah, well—I must be going now. It takes a weary time for such an aged man to be getting down the path. It will be night when I am home again. Here is William coming with his pick which was an appendage born to him. I will be going down a bit in his company and learning the way of things at London. You must love words, Merlin, to be making so many of them; and I must love pain, to be engendering it against myself.

“And, Merlin, I think you are a trickster and a fraud; every time I have gone away from you it has been with the conviction that you have said mighty things, yet, on thinking, I could never recall any of them. I think you work a subtle conjuring with the soft voice of you, and your harps.”

And as he went down the path, the hanging harps crooned after him the Sorcerer’s Farewell.

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