And when Abigail saw David she alighted and bowed down to the ground before him. “Let not my lord,” she said, “regard my husband, who is a foolish person. See, here is a present, all that you can wish. Do not shed blood without a cause. I know that the Lord will certainly make my lord victorious over all the land, because my lord fights the battles of the Lord and does no evil. And the enemies of my lord shall the Lord sling out as from the middle of a sling. And it shall come to pass, when the Lord shall have made thee ruler over Israel, thou wilt be glad to remember that thou hast shed no blood without a cause, or in revenge.” And David said to Abigail, “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, which sent thee this day to meet me, and blessed be thy advice, and blessed be thou, which hast kept me this day from coming to shed blood, and from avenging myself with my own hand. For in very deed, as the Lord God of Israel liveth, except thou hadst hasted and come to meet me, surely by the morning light both Nabal and all that belong to him should have perished miserably.” Then David received her gift, and said to her, “Go up in peace to thy house. See, I have harkened to thy voice and have accepted thy person.” So Abigail turned about and went one way, and David turned about and went the other way. Nabal’s men were eating and drinking, as Abigail came home, sitting at a feast fit for a king. Nabal was drunken, and merry with the foolish merriment of drink. So she told him nothing, either less or more, until the morning light. Then she said, “Nabal, yesterday your life was in great danger, and I saved you. David was on his way here with four hundred men, and I met him and turned him back.” And Nabal was so filled with terror that his heart, for the moment, ceased to beat: as if he had been walking in his sleep and had waked to find himself on the very edge of a steep cliff. And his fright and the liquor he had drunk brought on a sudden sickness. He went to bed, and never got up again: and in ten days he was dead. Now David’s wife, the princess Michal, had been taken from him by the king and married to another man. And, anyhow, it was then the custom for men to have more wives than one. So when the tidings of the death of Nabal came to David, his heart turned toward the brave and beautiful lady who had stopped him on the road. And again a band of messengers from David approached the house which had once been Nabal’s, but this time they asked in David’s name not for bread and meat, but for the hand of Abigail. And Abigail, remembering the grace and courtesy of the bold outlaw, consented. XXXVIII THE ADVENTURE OF THE KING’S SPEAR