Through dark and loathsome places they went, through narrow streets and back alleys and courts, where people scurried away like rats as the gutter children had done in the daytime. King Amor could not have seen them but that he had brought with him a bright lantern and held it up in the air above his high head. The light shining upon his beautiful face and his crown made him look more than ever like a young god and giant, and the people cowered terrified before him, asking each other what such a King would do to wretches like themselves. But just a few very little children smiled at him because he was so young and bright and splendid. No one in the black holes and corners could understand why a King should come walking among them on the night of his coronation day. Most of them thought that the next morning he would order them all to be killed, and their houses burned, because he would only think of them as vermin. Once as he passed through a dark court a madman darted out in his path shaking his fist. "We hate you!" he cried out. "We hate you!" The dwellers in the court gasped with terror, wondering what would happen. But the tall young King stood holding his lantern above his head and gazing at the madman with deep thought in his eyes. "There is no time for hatred in the world," he said. "There is no time." And then he passed on. The look of deep thought was in his face throughout the hours in which he strode on until he had seen all he had come to see. The next day he rode back up the mountain to his castle on the crag, and when the night fell he lay out upon the battlements under the sky as he had done on so many nights. The soft wind blew about him as he looked up at the stars. "I do not know, my brothers," he said to them. "Tell me." And he lay silent until the great sweet stillness of the night seemed to fill his soul, and when the stars began to fade he slept in rapturous peace. The people in his kingdom on the plain waited, wondering what he would do. During the next few days they quarreled and hated each other more than ever, the rich ones because they all wanted to gain his favor, and each was jealous of the other; the poor ones because they were afraid of him and each man feared that his neighbor would betray things he had done in the past. Only two boys working together in a field, having stopped to wrangle and fight, one of them suddenly stood still remembering something, and said a strange thing in a strange voice: "There is no time for anger. There is no time." And as he fell to work again his companion did the same, and when they had finished their task of weeding they talked about the thing and remembered that when they had quarreled the day before they had not finished their task at all, and had not been paid, and had gone home sore from the blows they had given each other, and had had no supper. "No, there is no time," they decided.