"You are queen of me at least," I said, following her, and throwing all my republican principles into the river among the other wreckage. "And your Majesty's liege cannot endure to see you walk unattended so late in the night." "I have God's company," she answered quietly. "True; He is always with us. Nevertheless, at night and in the mountains--" "He may be perceived more clearly. My father makes soul-ascensions at any hour by force of prayer. But for me the divine ecstasy comes only under God's heaven, and most clearly at night and among the graves. By day God is invisible, like the stars." "They may be perceived from a well," I said, mechanically, for my brain was busy with the intuition that she was Ben David's daughter, that her "queendom" was somehow bound up with his alleged royal descent. "Even so is God visible from the deeps of the spirit," she answered. "But these depths are not mine, and day speaks to me less surely of Him." "The day is divine too," I urged. "God speaks also through joy, through sunshine." "It is but the gilding of sorrow." "Nay, that is too hard a saying. How can you know that? You"--I made a bold guess, for my brain had continued to work feverishly--"who live cloistered in a turret, who are kept sequestered from man, who walk at night, and only among the dead. How can you know that life is so sad?" "I feel it. Is not every stone in the graveyard hewn from the dead heart of the mourners?" All the sadness of the world was in her eyes, yet somehow all the sweet solace. Again she bade me good-night, and I was so under the spell of her strange reply that I made no further effort to follow her, as she was swallowed up in the gloom of the firs where the path wound back round the mountain. IV The floods abated before the New Year dawned, as was testified by the arrival, not of doves with olive leaves, but of pilgrims from the north with shekels. The road was therefore open for me to go, yet I lingered. I told myself it was the fascination of the pilgrims, that curious new population which brought quite a bustle into the "Ring-Place" of Zloczszol, and gave even the shops of the native _Chassidim_ a live air. There were unpleasant camp-followers in the train of the invading army, cripples and consumptives, both rich and poor; but, on the whole, it was a cheery, well-to-do company. I retained my room by paying the rent of three lodgers, and even then Yarchi would come in and look at the big, tall bed wistfully, as if it were a waste of sleeping material.