And Gerald said also: “Even in the private relations which you have chivalrously preserved for me, my dear fellow, one must not ask everything. Wheresoever a man lives, there will be a thornbush near his door: and I can manage well enough, I daresay, to put up with the continuance of this illicit love-affair,—in which, after all, my advanced age now protects me from being put to any frequent or far-reaching inconvenience. Meanwhile, the legend of a life-long illicit love-affair is a very splendid preservative for the fame of any writer. It would have been even better, of course, if in conjugating the verb to love, you had managed to make a few mistakes in gender; that is more piquant; that is infallible: still, I repeat, one must not ask everything. I have my satisfying legend of private immorality, created without any least trouble on my part. Men will remember it. So all ends very well indeed. I am content with what I have found upon Mispec Moor. I am content with what I have found in Lichfield. And I shall not bother any more about Antan, wherein, for one reason and another, I have found nothing.” “Do you not be speaking lightly of Antan! For I—do you not understand?”—the young man spoke with an almost frightened elation,—“it is I who am called to reign in Antan. You have brought me the revealing word and the dreadful summons of Horvendile. Antan is my appointed kingdom, into which I shall now be entering upon the silver stallion famous in old prophecies.” “Oh, oh!” said Gerald, “so that is how it is! All ends, again, with that rather hackneyed scoring _Da capo_. And the eternal quest of Antan continues, for all that I have no part in it....” Yet the boy’s joyousness and proud faith appeared to old Gerald Musgrave pitiable beyond thought. Gerald, now that he was fifty-eight, was of course not really troubled by that pitiableness, because all actual commiseration and sympathy for other persons had withered in him along with the rest of youth’s over-upsetting emotions. Besides, Gerald saw that, in logic, as a plain question of arithmetic, the boy did not matter. A million or so other lads more or less like this enthusiastic young fellow were at that instant preparing for the same downcasting and failure; and by and by these lads also would be facing their own unimportance with equanimity. For, as you—howsoever suddenly,—got older, there was less bitterness, there was hardly any bitterness at all, to be derived of the knowledge that in human living very much amounted to nothing, because you saw even more clearly and more constantly that nothing amounted to very much....