“And I was happy there for a long while,” said Merlin. “My toys, now that I played no more with them, began to break one another. Dissension and lust and hatred woke among them. They forgot the very pretty notion which I had given them in their turn to play with. The land was no longer an ordered realm. My toys now fought in the land’s naked fields, and they murderously waylaid one another in its old forests. Arthur was dead, at the hands of his own bastard son begotten in incest. It was an awkward ending for the heir apparent of Heaven. The Round Table was dissolved. The land was starved and sick and frightened.” Now Merlin, the old poet who did not any longer delight to shape and to play with puppets, had paused: and he sat gazing thoughtfully, with wholly patient, tired eyes, at nothing in particular. Then Merlin said: “I heard of all these things. They did not matter. I was happy. Yes, I suppose that I was happy. My ways were utterly domestic. They stayed thus for a long while.... There was no variety. In that small heaven which a child had builded out of the magic air of April there was no variety whatever. There was no enemy, no adversary for me to get the better of through some cunning device. There was only happiness.... Nimuë stayed always young and kind and beautiful and contented just because I was there. The child loved me. But there was no variety. No son of my father stays forever a domestic animal. So in the end I who was Merlin Ambrosius found my desire was not in that tower of April air. There was only heaven. There was only just such a never-changing happiness as I had once talked about to the gaping, smooth-chinned boy and to his shaggy followers.” “Yet how could you escape from the blessings of a happy home-life, Messire Merlin, if that tower was truly enchanted?” “It does not seem reasonable that I should tell you all my secrets,” Merlin replied, drily, “any more than it seemed reasonable that the son of my father should share every secret with Nimuë. The child loved me utterly. And I loved her. Yes, I loved Nimuë as I have loved no other creature fluttering about earth. She did not seem to walk.... Even so, I was Merlin Ambrosius. So in the end I left my child mistress. I quitted the small heaven which a child’s pure-mindedness had contrived. And I go now into Antan to get, it may be, my desire.” Then there was silence, now that the three mages had all spoken.