However, it was that poor devil in the library who was now involved in the dangerous task of carrying through an adultery in Lichfield after the fashion of well-bred persons. It was in his ears that a still rather dear but too damnably adhesive Evelyn would be bleating every day a reiteration of the fact that she had trusted him and had given him all. And Gerald himself, having decorously laid down his life rather than violate this dreadful code of a gentleman, was now fairly in train to become a competent magician. Not ever again would he sit writing among those bookshelves, engrossed, and rubbing at his chin or forehead, or scratching his head, or sticking his little finger into his ear, or restively shifting his weight from one buttock to the other buttock, in his multiform efforts to quicken, somehow, the flow of lagging thought. He would pause no more to prop his chin (with an unpleasantly moist hand, as a rule), and thus to stare lack-wittedly at one or another of the china and brass toys which he had, quite as idiotically, collected to make vivid his bookshelves. All these queer exercises, as Gerald, standing there, had seen them in the last few minutes performed by the natural body of Gerald Musgrave, did, manifestly, not constitute an engaging or a sane way of spending the evening, in a somewhat stuffy room. No, he was now, forever, very happily done with all these forlorn gymnastics. It was only the natural body of Gerald Musgrave which henceforward would, before this commensurately irrational audience of small elephants and dogs and parrots and chicken, go through these foolish writhing antics, in that wholly nice looking young idiot’s endeavor to complete the romance about Dom Manuel of Poictesme.... Well, one could but wish the poor devil joy of his bargain! and it no longer really mattered that all which pertained to Gerald Musgrave was rather droll, Gerald decided, as he passed out of sight of that red head bent over that incessant pen scratching. PART TWO THE BOOK OF TWILIGHT “It is Not Well to Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth.” 5. Christening of the Stallion GERALD descended nineteen steps; and in the dusk he found waiting there, beside a tethered riding-horse, yet another young man, with hair as red as Gerald Musgrave’s own. “That you may travel the more quickly, along a woman-haunted way, in your journeying toward your appointed goal,” this stranger began, “I have fetched a horse for you to ride upon.” Yet the speaker was not wholly a stranger. So Gerald now said, “Oh, so it is you!” As a student of magic, Gerald had held earlier dealings with this red-haired Horvendile, who was Lord of the Marches of Antan. And Gerald went on, gratefully: “Come now, but this is kind! Even as a courtesy between fellow artists, this is generous!”