and she knew that, whoever the climber was, the climber was not her father. Then she sighed a little sigh and turned and entered her dwelling and drew the door behind her, and the mountain-top was lonely for a time. Only for a time. Up the hill came a fantastical fellow, alternately singing and sighing, for it seemed that the fierce heat vexed him despite of his melody. He was a strange ape, tall and lean and withered, with a wry shoulder like a gibbous moon and a wry leg like a stricken tree, and his face was as the face of a goblin, with a long, peaked nose, and loose, protruding lips, traitors to the few and evil teeth that interwalled his livid gums, and his ears stood out like bats’ wings from his yellow, wrinkled cheeks. He was visibly punished by his journey; the sweat streamed from his leather and under his puckered eyelids his eyes flamed imprecations. His grotesque body was enveloped in yet more grotesque apparel—the piebald of the buffoon, the mottled livery of the chartered mountebank. There was a slender collar of gold about his neck, on which those that were near enough to him and had quick sight might read in plain terms that he was a royal fool, one of those jesters whom the great loved to tend to their beck, that they might ply them with mirth in hours that were mirthless. When the fantastical fellow had reached the summit he flung himself at once onto the nearest seat that one of the fallen columns afforded, and sat for a space gasping and puffing and spitting out blasphemies between every gasp and puff of his staggered anatomy.

When his wind came to him it took shape in a furious soliloquy, addressed to the vacant space about. “Devil take the day!” he grunted, pressing his hands to his lean sides as if he were trying to squeeze back the breath into his jaded body. “The sun rides as sky-high as the King’s pride, and the air blazes as dog-hot as the King’s choler. I have climbed the hill-side to spite him, and now am like to die of thirst to spite myself, unless I can find friends and flagons.”

So he chattered to himself as if he were conversing with some familiar spirit or demon, and as he babbled his dull eyes stared around him stupidly, taking slow stock of unfamiliar objects. He grinned spitefully at the church and its great archangel and mouthed a lewd objurgation. Turning his back on the church, he leered at the pillars and the mosque contemptuously until it dimly dawned upon him that the ruin was now a place of human habitation. He rose with a groan of fatigue and hobbled towards it. “A church is no good,” he muttered, “but hospitality may hide in that hovel. Knock and know.” And having by this time arrived at the door of the dwelling, he proceeded to rain a succession of blows on it with his clinched fists, as if he were determined not to be denied, and, at worst, to force an entrance.

The fury of his call was soon answered. Perpetua flung back the door and faced the insistent fool.

“Is doom-crack at hand,” she asked, quietly, as she eyed the strange figure before her, “that you hammer so hotly?”

The misshapen petitioner surrendered something of his malevolence to the beauty of the girl. He swept her a salutation that exaggerated courtliness, and there was a quality of apology in his voice as he spoke.

“I am sand dry as the ancient desert, and to be thirsty roughens my temper. Ply me tongue-high with wine and I will pipe for you blithely.”

Perpetua shook her head, and her red locks gleamed and quivered with the motion like an aureole of flame.

“I have no wine,” she said, gravely, “for my father denies its virtues. But there is a pitcher of milk within at your pleasure.”

At the mention of the word milk the face of the petitioning fool, ugly enough when untroubled by crosses, took upon itself an expression so hideous that if the girl’s spirit had ever permitted her to recoil from any terror she might have recoiled from that.

“Milk!” he yelped, and the sound of his voice was as ugly as the show of his face. “Milk! Gods of the Greeks! Milk! Your father is no less than a fool to favor such liquor.”

The girl’s red eyebrows knitted. “Unless you mend your manners,” she said, decisively, “you shall go as thirsty as you came. You dare not speak so to my father’s face.”

The fool answered with a little crackling laugh, while the wide sweep of his withered fingers seemed at once to plead for forgiveness and to justify impertinence.

“Fair virgin of the heights and of the hollows,” he cackled, “I would speak so to his face or to his foot or to any part of his honorable anatomy, for, you see, I am a fool myself, and may pass the crazy name without cuffing. Come, I will sip your white syrup to please you.”

The girl shrugged her shoulders at the sudden condescension. “Please yourself. There is water, if you disdain milk.”

The hunchback twisted his pliant features into a new and peculiarly repulsive form of protest.

“Even as there is the devil if you escape from the deep sea,” he sneered. “I begin to lust after milk now.”

The maiden looked at him for a moment, with a curious pity for his changing moods and his changeless deformity. Then she turned and entered her home, from which she emerged a moment later with a vessel of milk in one hand and a silver cup in the other. She filled the cup with milk and handed it to the fool, who took it from her fingers with an ill grace. His spiteful eyes grinned at the white fluid malignly, as if whatever it emblemed of purity, of simplicity, exasperated him. He leered up again at the girl with the same visible rage at her purity, her simplicity, and he made a little tilting motion with his fingers, as if the devil in him were minded to dash the milk in the maid’s face. But her indifference defied him and the thirst tugged at his throat.

“Water is the drink of the wise,” the girl said, steadily. “But milk is the wine of the gods.”

She was saying words that her father often said, and for his sake they seemed very fair and very true, and she uttered them lovingly. To the fool they seemed the last frenzy of folly. But there was nothing better to drink, and his dryness yearned furiously. He lifted the cup to his lips and sipped with a wry face. Then he glanced up at the girl slyly.

“It were but courteous to drink my hostess’s health, but I will not pledge your ripeness in so thin-spirited a tipple. Yet a malediction may cream on it, so here’s damnation to the King.”

And as he spoke he drank again, and seemed to drink with more gusto, but the girl frowned at his malevolence.

“The milk should be sour that is supped so sourly,” she said.

The grimace on the twisted face deepened into a sneer as the fool handed back the empty cup, to be filled again.

“Mistress Red-head,” he said, “if you knew the King as well as I know him you would damn him as deeply.”

Perpetua’s wide eyes watched the deformed thing with wonder. She thought he must, indeed, be mad to rail at the good King, so she answered him gently as she gave him back the full cup.

“I have lived on this hill-top all my life, and know little of the world of cities at the foot of the mountain. But whenever my father speaks of the King he calls him Robert the Good.”

PERPETUA AND DIOGENES THE FOOL

The fool shrugged