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the mounting events and circumstances of the world. She was gone out of the room—gone into pure Time, and that the future.

Old Robert watched the door close behind his wife, then settled himself with turnings as a dog settles.

“Now, Dafydd,” he said, and peered smiling into the fire, while Henry, kneeling on the floor, gazed with awe at this mortal who held the very distances in his palm.

“Well, Robert—it’s about the green jungle I wanted to tell and the brown Indians that live in it, and about him they call Pierre le Grand. But, Robert, there’s something gone out of me like a little winking light. I used to lie on the decks of ships at night and think and think how I'd talk and boast when only I came home again—but it’s more like a child, I am, come home to cry. Can you understand that, Robert? Can you understand that at all?” He was leaning forward eagerly.

“I'll tell you. We took the tall plate ship they call a galleon, and we with only pistols and the long knives they have for cutting trails in the jungle. Twenty-four of us there was—only twenty-four and ragged—but, Robert, we did horrid things with those same long knives. It’s no good for a man that was a farm lad to be doing such things and then thinking about them. There was a fine captain—and we hung him up by his thumbs before we killed him. I don’t know why we did it; I helped and I don’t know why. Some said he