It was a delicate task to cloud the clear liquid to this tint and that, to watch it change expression under our hands, pale, deepen, vary to our touch; in its heart to set jewels and to light fires. We worked with deep deliberation, testing by old standards of taste set up by at least two or three previous experiences, consulting one another’s soberest judgment, occasionally inventing a new liquid. I remember that it was on that day that we first thought of bluing. Common washing bluing, the one substance really intended for colouring water, had so far escaped our notice. “Somebody,” observed Margaret Amelia, as we worked, “ought to keep keeping a look-out to see if they’re coming back.” Delia, who was our man of action, ran to the clothes-reel, which stood on the highest land of the castle grounds, and looked away over the valley. “There’s a cloud of dust on the horizon,” she reported, “but I think it’s Mr. Wells getting home from Caledonia.” “Wouldn’t they blare their horns before they got here?” Mary Elizabeth wanted to know. “What was a knight _for_, anyway?” Delia demanded. “_For?_” Margaret Amelia repeated, in a kind of personal indignation. “Why, to--to--to right wrongs, of course.” Delia surveyed the surrounding scene through the diluted red ink in a glass-stoppered bottle. “I guess I know that,” she said. “But I mean, what was his job?” We had never thought of that. Did one, then, have to have a job other than righting wrongs? Margaret Amelia undertook to explain. “Why,” she said, “it was this way: Knights liberated damsels and razed down strongholds and took robber chieftains and got into adventures. And they lived off the king and off hermits.” “But what was the end of ’em?” Delia wanted to know. “They never married and lived happily ever after. They married and just kept right on going.” “That was on account of the Holy Grail,” said Mary Elizabeth. It was wonderful, as I look back, to remember how her face would light sometimes; as just then, and as when somebody came to school with the first violets. “The what?” said Delia. “They woke up in the night sometimes,” Mary Elizabeth recited softly, “and they saw it, in light, right there inside their dark cell. And they looked and looked, and it was all shiny and near-to. And when they saw it, they knew about all the principal things. And those that never woke up and saw it, always kept trying to, because they knew they weren’t _really_ ones till they saw. Most everybody wasn’t really, because only a few saw it. Most of them died and never saw it at all.” “What did it look like?” demanded Delia. “Hush!” said Calista, with a shocked glance, having somewhere picked up the impression that very sacred things, like very wicked things, must never be mentioned. But Mary Elizabeth did not heed her.