The surface of the beck seethed and boiled where the gentleman was imprisoned. Stephen knelt upon a flat stone and leant over the water. “I am sorry,” he said. “You intended nothing but kindness, I know.”

The gentleman’s hair streamed out like silver snakes in the dark water. His face was a terrible sight. In his fury and hatred he began to lose his resemblance to humankind: his eyes grew further apart, there was fur upon his face and his lips rolled back from his teeth in a snarl.

A voice inside Stephen’s mind said: “If you kill me, you will never know your name!”

“I am the nameless slave,” said Stephen. “That is all I have ever been – and today I am content to be nothing more.”

He spoke a word to the millstones. They flew up in the air and flung themselves down upon the gentleman. He spoke to the boulders and rocks; they did the same. The gentleman was old beyond telling, and very strong. Long after his bones and flesh must have been crushed to pieces, Stephen could feel whatever was left of him struggling to bind itself back together by magic. So Stephen spoke to the stony shoulders of the dale and asked them to help him. Earth and rock crumbled; it heaped itself on top of the millstones and the rocks until there was a hill standing there as high as the sides of the dale.

For years Stephen had felt as if a pane of dirty, grey glass hung between him and the world; the moment that the last spark of the gentleman’s life was extinguished, the pane shattered. Stephen stood a moment, gasping for breath.

But his allies and servants were growing doubtful. There was a question in the minds of the hills and the trees. They began to know that he was not the person they had taken him for – that all this was borrowed glory.

One by one he felt them withdraw. As the last one left him, he fell, empty and insensible, to the ground.

In Padua the Greysteels had already breakfasted and were gathered together in the little sitting-room on the first floor. They were not in the best of spirits this morning. There had been a disagreement. Dr Greysteel had taken to smoking a pipe indoors – a thing to which Flora and Aunt Greysteel were very much opposed. Aunt Greysteel had tried to argue him out of it, but Dr Greysteel had proved stubborn. Pipe-smoking was a pastime he was particularly fond of and he felt that he ought to be permitted an indulgence or two, to make up for their never going anywhere any more. Aunt Greysteel said that he ought to smoke his pipe outside. Dr Greysteel replied that he could not because it was raining. It was difficult to smoke a pipe in the rain – the rain made the tobacco wet.

So he was smoking the pipe and Aunt Greysteel was coughing; and Flora, who was disposed to blame herself, glanced at each from time to time with an unhappy expression. Things had gone on like this for about an hour when Dr Greysteel happened to look up and exclaimed in amazement, “My head is black! Completely black!”