"Is that it? How very kind, how good! I do not wake wilfully, but if I am awake I must work,--thou knowest that. In truth, Carl, hadst thou not been so weary, I should have asked thee this very night what I must ask thee to-morrow morning." "Ask me now, sir, for, if you remember, it _is_ to-morrow morning already." "Go get into your bed, then." "No, sir, certainly not while you are sitting there." A frown, like the shadow of a butterfly, floated over his forehead. "If thou wilt have it so, I will even go to this naughty bed, but not to sleep. The fact is, Carl, I cannot sleep in London. I think that something in the air distresses my brain; it will _not_ shut itself up. I was about to ask thee whether there is no country, nothing green, no pure wind, to be had within four miles?" "Sir, you have hit upon a prodigious providence. There is, as I can assure you experimentally, fresh green, pure country air of Heaven's own distilling within that distance; and there is also much more,--there is something you would like even better." "What is that, Carlomein?" "I will not tell you, sir, unless you sleep to-night." "To be sly becomes thee, precisely because thou art not a fox. I will lie down; but sleep is God's best gift, next to love, and he has deprived me of both." "If I be sly, sir, you are bitter. But there is not too much sleight, nor bitterness either, where they can be expressed from words. So, sir, come to bed." "Well spoken, Carlomein; I am coming,--sleep thou!" But I would not, and I did not leave him until I had seen his head laid low in all the bareness of its beauty, had seen his large eyelids fall, and had drawn his curtains in their softest gloom around the burdened pillow. Then I, too, went back to bed, and I slept delectably and dreamless. CHAPTER XII. Very late I slept, and before I had finished dressing, Starwood came for me. Seraphael had been down some time, he told me. I was very sorry, but relieved to discover how much more of his old bright self he wore than on the previous evening. "Now, Carlomein," he began immediately, "we are going on a pilgrimage directly after breakfast."