“Now the king had a certain ring, which at the beginning of his reign he had taken from the hand of a conquered monarch, and which he had always cherished as the symbol of his victorious career. It seemed to him the most precious of all his possessions, and so he went and threw it into the sea. “But the next evening as the king and the philosopher sat down to dinner, the cook came running in with the ring, which he had that moment found in the entrails of a fish which was going to be the king’s dinner. The king took it with great satisfaction, saying, ‘The gods have given me back my ring.’ “But the philosopher turned pale, and said, ‘The gods have rejected your gift,’ and immediately went home, fearing to be in that kingdom when the wrath of the gods descended upon it. “And when he had returned to Greece, he heard that the king’s enemies had descended upon the kingdom and overthrown it, and sacked the palace, and carried away the king’s wives, and built a great pyre of the palace furnishings and set the king on top of it on his golden throne, to be burnt.... “The story ends happily after all, in Herodotus. But it was a narrow squeak, and the gods only relented at the last minute, by softening the hearts of his conquerors and sending a rain to put out the fire. But the gods are capricious—and perhaps the next time they wouldn’t change their minds.” “And the rhyme you made up about it?” Phyllis asked. “Well, it points the moral of the tale: “_When there is nothing left to wish, And Earth’s too much like Heaven, Throw away some lovely gift Of all the gods have given!_ “_Too happy, like that king of old Who gave the sea his ring— Find out if there’s in store for you The fate of that old king!_” Rose-Ann sat up and smiled at him. “But Felix,” she said, “you’ve got it all wrong! You don’t understand the moral of that old fable at all!” “No?” “No!” said Rose-Ann. “The gods were angry at that old king because he didn’t appreciate what they had done for him.... It was because he threw away some of the loveliness that they had given him, that they punished him. He was a coward—and the gods don’t like cowards!” “No?” ... Felix was realizing now consciously what he had meant by the story. Those evenings in his work-room, with the door open between him and Phyllis, and Phyllis come in to sit on the floor beside him in some interval of his work—intervals that grew longer and longer—all the sweetness of that friendship, so much more than friendship that it was almost like love ... it was this that he was going to throw away. He was going to give up his room, and get another, or return to the studio to work. It was this intention that he had unconsciously in mind when he wrote— “_Throw away some lovely gift Of all the gods have given!_”