Then Horvendile replied: “A fool with so many fine words at his tongue’s tip, a fool also is not to be argued with. For it is a foolishness beyond any describing, to believe that Antan can be destroyed by you or by anybody else. Ah, no! your kingdom awaited you, poor Gerald: but you faltered, you fell away into domesticity,—and you talked! Now it is the Master Philologist who, through the might of that word which was in the beginning, and which will be when all else has perished, has removed your kingdom from your reach, and from your seeing, and even from your quite whole-hearted belief, forever. Now it is your only comfort to poultice your failure with such foolish phrases. And now also it is I who tell you that for such faltering and for such failure, and for such phrases, there is possible but one answer.” Thereafter Horvendile gave Gerald a queer word of power, and Horvendile took out of his pocket a little mirror three inches square. You heard in the duskiness a flapping of small vigorous wings. Then three white pigeons stood among the swine, at the feet of Horvendile. He did what was requisite: and Gerald thus came straightway into a place which was not unfamiliar. PART TWELVE THE BOOK OF ACQUIESCENCE “Candor is no More Palatable than an Oyster when Either is Out of Season.” 48. Fruits of the Sylan’s Industry GERALD came thus into the library in which, no more than four months ago, as it appeared to him, he had quitted his natural body. Lights burned there, but the room was empty. Nor did he perceive any marked signs of change. Most of his books were very much as he had left them. Upon the bookcases were still ranged his porcelain and brass animals and birds and reptiles. Investigation, though, revealed the addition to this diminutive fauna of a rather charming china cat,—a black cat, fast asleep, with a red ribbon about its neck,—and of a small ivory elephant, which also was black, but had white tusks. The chairs, he saw, had been recovered, but it was with a figured stuff of much the same design and color. The rug that once had been his mother’s was still underfoot; and the curtains, while new looking, were of just the same repulsive shade of green velvet that by candle light turned yellowish. “It is a quite detestable color. I had always intended to change those curtains so soon as I could afford it, for a green with some real life in it. I can but deduce that my body has remained remarkably conservative through all these thirty years which have seemed to me only a month or two. My body has evinced commendable industry, also, for here are dozens upon dozens of books by Gerald Musgrave.”