Again, as when he had considered the soul of Rollo, St. George
smiled a shade bitterly. Is it then so easy to persist, he wondered?
Is love's uttermost gift so little? But as the music swelled with
premonitory meaning, he understood something that its very
transitoriness disclosed: the persistence of love, love's mere
immortality, is the dead letter of the law without that which is
elusive, imponderable, even evanescent as the spirit of the land to
which he had come, into which he felt himself new-born.
Immediately, bestowing its gift of altered mood, other music, cut by
the lift and fall of trumpets, sounded from hidden places all about
the walls and from the alcoves of the lofty roof. Then a veil
hanging between two pillars was drawn aside, and the prince's train
appeared. There were a detachment of the guard, splendid in their
unrelieved gold, and the officers of the court, at their head
Cassyrus, the premier, who had manifestly been compounded of Heaven
to be a drum-major, and had so undeviating a look that he seemed
always to have been caught, red-handed, at his post.
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