The surmise quickly became a firm belief--so firm that, in spite of protests from the precise Shib, songs of thanksgiving were heartily sung before the cave was approached and examined. People were much puzzled. The dead man lying at the cave’s mouth, grasping in one hand a flat stone and in the other a charred staff, was not quickly recognised as Thol, so black were his hair and skin; nor was he at once known to have been the dragon. The quantities of stacked wood, the tunnel into the cave where Thol had lived, did not quickly divulge their meaning. Only after long arguments and many conjectures did the homelanders understand the trick that had been played on them. Why, with what evil intent, it had been played, they were almost too angry to discuss at present. But certain words of Thia’s were remembered; and it was felt that she herself perhaps had put the trick into Thol’s mind and that this was why she had fled the homeland. She had better not set foot in it again. Before the sun sank, Thol was buried without honour, and far from Thia. And before the sun sank many other times the homelanders were as they had been before the coming of the true dragon, and as they had been again before the false one was among them. FINIS And thus--does our tale end unhappily? I think not. After all, the homelanders at large are rather shadowy to us. Oc and Loga, Shib and Veo, Afa and her like, and all those others, all those nameless others, do not mean much to us. It is Thol and Thia that we care about. For their sake we wish that the good they did could have been lasting. But it is not in the nature of things that anything--except the nature of things--should last. Saints and wise statesmen can do much. Their reward is in the doing of it. They are lucky if they do not live long enough to see the undoing. It should suffice us that Thol and Thia together in their last days knew a happiness greater than they had ever known--Thol a greater happiness than in the days of his glory, and Thia than in the days of hers. PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE WHITEFRIARS PRESS, LTD., LONDON AND TONBRIDGE. FOOTNOTE: [A] Lest the reader assume that in the course of this narrative one or both of Thia’s parents will return to claim her, let me at once state that within a few months of her being left in the homeland her father was killed by a lion, and her mother by a lioness, in what has since become Shropshire. TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES: Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized. Archaic or variant spelling has been retained. New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.