Gerald looked for one instant at the most lovely of all the illusions he had found in the Mirror of Caer Omn. Then he began to recite the multiplication tables. You saw that she was frightened. She said, “Oh, and I trusted you! I gave you all!” She bleated now; her beauty was dimmed: and she seemed just the Evelyn Townsend who had pestered Gerald beyond any reasonable endurance. But Gerald, howsoever heavy was the heart of Gerald who quite honestly objected to being troubled by anything, went on inexorably to exorcise Evarvan with the old runes of common-sense. He spoke of the elephant that is the largest of beasts, and of the very dissimilar household economy practised by a King of Israel and by Elijah the Tishbite, and of the straight line that is the shortest distance between two points; and the old magic was potent. Before his eyes Evarvan of the Mirror was changed. Of the degradation which was put upon her, it suffices to report that this lovely lady went backward in the course of every mortal woman’s living. She passed from girlhood into a lank-legged childhood, and thence into drooling and feebly puking infancy, and after that into the shapes she had worn in her mother’s womb. In the end there remained of the most dear illusion which Gerald had found in the Mirror of Caer Omn only two pink figures in the form of a soft throbbing egg and of a creature like a tadpole darting lustfully about it: and these melted back into the moonshine of the Sacred Mirror of Caer Omn. Nor was that all. The wives of Glaum and the Temple of the Mirror and all that was about Gerald began to waver. All the material things about him showed now like paintings on a gauze curtain which was moving and crinkling in a very gentle breeze. The shaping of the six wives became longer and more attenuated: they were shaped like the shadows of women in a fine sunset. These so prettily tinted shadows strained toward the mirror and entered it precisely as you may see smoke drift toward and out of an opened window. Then all the temple followed them collapsingly, as if colored waters were running into a hole. The mirror swallowed all. Caer Omn was gone: the land of Dersam was a ruined land without inhabitants. Afterward the pale glass blinked seven times like summer lightning, and the mirror was not there. Gerald stood alone in a cedar-shadowed way. He was weeping quite unaffectedly. His very deepest poetic sensibilities had been touched by the rather beautiful idea that he had loved this woman all his life-long, and that now he had lost her forever: but a little way behind Gerald the silver stallion stayed unimmolated, and grazed placidly. PART FIVE THE BOOK OF LYTREIA “Whether You Boil or Roast Snow, You Can Have but Water of It.” 15. At Tenjo’s Court