He leaned hack in his throne, and Theos sat wearily down among the flowers at the foot of the dais as commanded.  He was possessed by a strange, inward dread,—­the dread of altogether losing the consciousness of his own identity,—­and while he strove to keep a firm grasp on his mental faculties he at the same time abandoned all hope of ever extricating himself from the perplexing enigma in which he was so darkly involved.  Forcing himself by degrees into comparative calmness, he determined to resign himself to his fate,—­and the idea he had just had of boldly claiming the ballad sung by Sah-luma as his own, completely passed out of his mind.

How could he speak against this friend whom he loved, ..aye!—­more than he had ever loved any living thing!—­besides what could he prove?  To begin with, in his present condition ho could give no satisfactory account of himself,—­if he were asked questions concerning his nation or birth-place he could not answer them, . . he did not even know where he had come from, save that his memory persistently furnished him with the name of a place called “Ardath.”  But what was this “Ardath” to him, he mused?—­What did it signify? ... what had it to do with his immediate position?  Nothing, so far as he could tell!  His intellect seemed to be divided into two parts—­one a total blank, . . the other filled with crowding images that while novel were yet curiously familiar.  And how could he accuse Sah-luma of literary theft, when he had none of his own dated manuscripts to bear out his case?  Of course he could easily repeat his boyhood’s verses word for word, ... but what of that?  He, a stranger in the city, befriended and protected by the Laureate, would certainly be considered by the people of Al-Kyris as far more likely to steal Sah-luma’s thoughts than that Sah-luma should steal his!

No!—­there was no help for it,—­as matters stood he could say nothing,—­he could only feel as though he were the sorrowful ghost of some long-ago dead author returned to earth to hear others claiming his works and passing them off as original compositions.  And thus he was scarcely moved to any fresh surprise when Sah-luma, giving back the harp to his attendant, rose up, and standing erect in an attitude unequalled for grace and dignity, began to recite a poem he remembered to have written when he was about twenty years of age,—­a poem daringly planned, which when published had aroused the bitterest animosity of the press critics on account of what they called its “forced sublimity.”  The sublimity was by no means “forced”—­it was the spontaneous outcome of a fresh and ardent nature full of enthusiasm and high-soaring aspiration, but the critics cared nothing for this, . . all they saw was a young man presuming to be original, and down they came upon him accordingly.