Page:Tales of the long bow.pdf/84

 if when I had really found it at last ." The catch in her voice came again and silence caught and held her.

He took one stride forward as into the heart of a whirlwind; and they met on the top of that windy hill as if they had come from the ends of the earth.

"This is an epic," he said, "which is rather an action than a word. I have lived with words too long."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you have turned me into a man of action," he replied. "So long as you were in the past, nothing was better than the past. So long as you were only a dream, nothing was better than dreaming. But now I am going to do something that no man has ever done before."

He turned towards the valley and flung out his hand with a gesture, almost as if the hand had held a sword.

"I am going to break the Prophecy," he cried in a loud voice. "I am going to defy the omens of my doom and make fun of my evil star. Those who called me a failure shall own I have succeeded where all humanity has failed. The real hero is not he who is bold enough to fulfil the predictions, but he who is