Prassade came out presently and Mancha with him. They looked nor spoke to no one as they came down the gully, but each took up a stone, walking with it laboriously, and laid it at the cave’s mouth. Then one of the men went and did the same, and the others, and Herman. At last Ravenutzi, seeing no one hindered him, took up a stone and went up and down with them, carrying, until the mouth of the cave was quite full. Presently Ravenutzi’s wife, grown tired of waiting, crept back through the stone arch and stood watching them with red bitten lip, coiling and uncoiling the long strands of her hair. XIV. THE KING’S DESIRE, AND WHAT BECAME OF IT The party of us that came up from River Ward to Leaping Water turned aside from the meadow where the Meet had been, and settled in one of the galleries of that amphitheater looking down on its veiled cascades. The shouting of the falls came up to us mixed with the faint, incessant murmur given off by a great forest. From here the rim of the world sank westward into the thin blue ring of the sea. We had come so slowly, being joined at times by families of Outliers, come out of safe hiding and already furnished with news. We were scarcely well settled in the place when word of the death of the Ward began to circulate among them in that mysterious way of news to travel in the open. Doubtless it came by way of runners stationed out toward Windy Covers, by which trail the seekers of the Ward returned. Rumor of it was rife in the camp a full hour before Mancha and Prassade came in. There was very little said about it, they were at all times as private in their griefs as wild creatures, but I think they felt better satisfied to learn that the natural progress of her betrayal had furnished its own punishment and spared them the necessity of putting Zirriloë to death. Herman came and told me this, walking at dusk on an open hill where there was long grass blowing and shut-eyed heavy flowers among the grasses. But it was a long time before he would talk freely of that suggestion of excuse, put forth by Ravenutzi, which lay in the appeal to his craftsman’s soul of the girl’s bodily perfection. He had been no more able to resist taking into his hand that fair contrivance than any other jewel of gold and fine stones, and its turning to flesh and blood under his touch had been a bitter and unavoidable consequence. I think Herman’s inarticulateness grew out of feeling himself involved in the ruin of a lovely woman in the common culpability of men. She was a vase which they had pulled about among them in admiring, and dropped and shattered.