I say I think Herman felt this, though I do not now recall any words that passed between us on the subject. Yet I was at that time much nearer to understanding the beguilement of beauty, and the pain of its bafflement which drives men to create of words and paint and stone, forms of it by which no confusion can come. When I saw Ravenutzi sitting among the Far-Folk, with his knees drawn up under his hands and his delicate faun’s profile bent above them, looking out at me in the old way, at once wishful and compelling, the look I sent back to him was almost kind. The whiteness of his hair had been cut away, the drawn look of his skin smoothed out. I saw how young he was, a little of what those two women had seen who had been drawn by it to death and killing. His wife sat with her head propped against his shoulder. And for so long as she sat there, assured, accepted, it was plain there was for her neither anxiety nor pained remembrance, nor any other thing. One supposes death at all times so natural that the wound of it heals by its own processes. It was so with the Outliers. No later than the next morning much of the bitterness of loss had drained away with the dark. The business of the Ward being finished they turned without discursiveness to disposing of Ravenutzi, the Far-Folk and the King’s Desire. Though we had no inkling, Herman and I, what would be done to the smith, we felt it would be just; and whatever would be done to the Far-Folk, more than kind. Concerning the Treasure there must some command have circulated. Though we had seen it glinting in the camp at River Ward—there was scarcely a man who had not brought something away with him from the last fight—there was not so much as the red sparkle of a jewel to be seen at Leaping Water. The Council met early on the second morning, going down toward Council Hollow before the dew was dried upon the fern. All the camp, scattered as it was in a great treeless tract, hung in the breathless quiet of suspense. There was scarcely any stir of talk or movement except now and then among the Far-Folk, who lay all together like cattle on a warm hill slope, turning toward the sun. Herman and I, since no one seemed to regard us, thought of going down to revisit the meadow and the lovely open water below the Leap. But the expectant sense that brooded over the camp bound us to the consideration of what might be decided about us personally at the Council. If we looked afar at the sea rim, trying to make out at what point we were, we looked suddenly back to see if the councilors were not coming up the hill. If we heard a lark rising with its breast all brightening yellow from some grassy water border, we listened the more anxiously immediately to hear if any one had come to call us in to judgment.