Florian looked down from the porch where they were waiting the while that Queen Pressina finished dressing. From this porch Florian could see a part of the modern world, very far beneath them. He saw the forests lying like dark flung-by scarves upon the paler green of cleared fields; he saw the rivers as narrow shinings. In one place, very far beneath them, a thunderstorm was passing like—of all things, on this blissful day,—a drifting bride’s-veil. Florian saw it twinkle with a yellow glow, then it was again a floating small white veil. And everywhere the lands beneath him bathed in graduations of vaporous indistinction. Poictesme seemed woven of blue smokes and of green mists. It afforded no sharp outline anywhere as his gazing passed outward toward the horizon. And there all melted bafflingly into a pearl-colored sky: the eye might not judge where, earth ending, heaven began in that bright and placid radiancy. It was droll to see this familiar, everyday, quite commonplace Poictesme in that guise, to see it as so lovely, when one knew what sort of men and women were strutting and floundering through what sort of living down there. It would be pleasant to remain here at high Brunbelois, and to be a king of the exalted old time that lingered here and nowhere else in all the world. But Florian remembered his bargain with brown Janicot, and he knew that in this high place it could not be performed: and it was as if with the brightness of Florian’s day-dreaming already mingled the shining of the sword with which Florian was to carry out his part of the bargain. Flamberge awaited him somewhere in those prosaic lowlands of 1723, down yonder. Therefore, as became a man of honor, Florian said, resolutely: “No, your majesty, my kingdom may not be of this world. For my duty lies yonder in that other world, wherein I at least shall yet have many months of happiness before that happens which must happen.” “So you are counting upon many months of happiness,” the King observed. “Your frame of mind, my son-in-law, is so thoroughly what it should be that to me it is rather touching.” “A pest! and may one ask just what, exactly, moves your majesty toward sadness?” “The reflection that there is no girl anywhere but has in her much of her mother,” the King answered, darkly. “But my dear wife is already dressed, I perceive, and is waiting for us, after having detained us hardly two hours. So let us be getting to the temple.” “Very willingly!” said Florian. He wondered a little at the blindness of fathers, but he was unutterably content. And straightway he and Melior were married, in the queer underground temple of the Peohtes, according to the marriage rites of Llaw Gyffes.