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“Pull up!” cried Ascobaruch to the charioteer.

He had recognized that laugh. It was the laugh of Merolchazzar.

Ascobaruch crept to the wall and cautiously poked his head over it. The sight he saw drove the blood from his face and left him white and haggard.

The King and the Grand Vizier were playing a foursome against the Pro and the High Priest of Hec, and the Vizier had just laid the High Priest a dead stymie.

Ascobaruch tottered to the chariot.

“Take me back,” he muttered, pallidly. “I’ve forgotten something!”

* * * * *

And so golf came to Oom, and with it prosperity unequalled in the whole history of the land. Everybody was happy. There was no more unemployment. Crime ceased. The chronicler repeatedly refers to it in his memoirs as the Golden Age. And yet there remained one man on whom complete felicity had not descended. It was all right while he was actually on the Linx, but there were blank, dreary stretches of the night when King Merolchazzar lay sleepless on his couch and mourned that he had nobody to love him.

Of course, his subjects loved him in a way. A new statue had been erected in the palace square, showing him in the act of getting out of casual water. The minstrels had composed a whole cycle of up-to-date songs, commemorating his prowess with the mashie. His handicap was down to twelve. But these things are not all. A golfer needs a loving wife, to whom he can describe the day’s play through the long evenings. And this was just where Merolchazzar’s life was empty. No word had come from the Princess of the Outer Isles, and, as he refused to be put off with just-as-good substitutes, he remained a lonely man.

But one morning, in the early hours of a summer day, as he lay sleeping after a disturbed night, Merolchazzar was awakened by the eager hand of the Lord High Chamberlain, shaking his shoulder.

“Now what?” said the King.

“Hoots, your Majesty! Glorious news! The Princess of the Outer Isles waits without–I mean wi’oot!”

The King sprang from his couch.

“A messenger from the Princess at last!”

“Nay, sire, the Princess herself–that is to say,” said the Lord Chamberlain, who was an old man and had found it hard to accustom himself to the new tongue at his age, “her ain sel’! And believe me, or rather, mind ah’m telling ye,” went on the honest man, joyfully, for he had been deeply exercised by his monarch’s troubles, “her Highness is the easiest thing to look at these eyes hae ever seen. And you can say I said it!”

“She is beautiful?”

“Your majesty, she is, in the best and deepest sense of the word, a pippin!”

King Merolchazzar was groping wildly for his robes.

“Tell her to wait!” he cried. “Go and amuse her. Ask her riddles! Tell her anecdotes! Don’t let her go. Say I’ll be down in a moment. Where in the name of Zoroaster is our imperial mesh-knit underwear?”

* * * * *

A fair and pleasing sight was the Princess of the Outer Isles as she stood on the terrace in the clear sunshine of the summer morning, looking over the King’s gardens. With her delicate little nose she sniffed the fragrance of the flowers. Her blue eyes roamed over the rose bushes, and the breeze ruffled the golden curls about her temples. Presently a sound behind her caused her to turn, and she perceived a godlike man hurrying across the terrace pulling up a sock. And at the sight of him the Princess’s heart sang within her like the birds down in the garden.

“Hope I haven’t kept you waiting,” said Merolchazzar, apologetically. He, too, was conscious of a strange, wild exhilaration. Truly was this maiden, as his Chamberlain had said, noticeably easy on the eyes. Her beauty was as water in the desert, as fire on a frosty night, as diamonds, rubies, pearls, sapphires, and amethysts.