‘They say that his dog and his eagle came down and carried him off themselves!’ corrected some sceptic jestingly.

‘I don’t believe in the dog,’ said one of the old men, ‘but the eagle is no joke. I remember that when I was a boy, one carried off a heavy sheep from our yard.’

Then Antiochus came back with the further news that the sick man had been overtaken halfway up to the mountain plateau, where he wished to die. The last upflickering of his fever lent him a fictitious strength and the dying hunter walked like a somnambulist to the place where he longed to be, and in order not to worry him and make him worse, his relatives had accompanied him and seen him safely to his own hut.

‘Now sit down and eat,’ said the priest to the boy.

Antiochus obeyed and took his place at the table, but not without first glancing inquiringly at the priest’s mother. She smiled and signed to him to do as he was bidden and the boy felt that he had become one of the family. He could not know, innocent child, that the other two, having exhausted the subject of the old hunter, were afraid of being alone together. The mother would see her son’s uneasy wandering eyes arrested suddenly, as though upon some unseen object, with a stony, sombre gaze, o’ershadowed by the darkness of his mind, and he in turn would start from his preoccupation, aware that she was observing him and divining his inward grief. But when she had placed the meal on the table she left the room and did not return.

With the bright noonday the wind rose again, but now it was a soft west wind that scarcely stirred the trees upon the ridge; the room was flooded with sunshine chequered by the dancing of the leaves outside the window, and white clouds drifted across the sky like harp-strings whereon the wind played its gentle music.

The charm was broken suddenly by a knock at the door and Antiochus ran to open. A pale young widow with frightened eyes stood on the threshold and asked to see the priest. By the hand she held fast a little girl, with small, livid face and a red scarf tied over her untidy black hair; and, as the child dragged and struggled from side to side in her efforts to free herself, her eyes blazed like a wild cat’s. ‘She is ill,’ said the widow, ‘and I want the priest to read the Gospel over her to drive out the evil spirit that has taken possession of her.’

Puzzled and scared, Antiochus stood holding the door half open: this was not the time to worry the priest with such matters, and moreover the girl, who was twisting herself all to one side and trying to bite her mother’s hand as she could not escape, was truly an object of both fear and pity.

‘She is possessed, you see,’ said the widow, turning red with shame. So then Antiochus let her in immediately and even helped her to push in the child, who clung to the jamb of the door and resisted with all her might.