The tortured King--seeing Merlin wholly meshed In his defection, even to indifference, And all the while attended and exalted By some unfathomable obscurity Of divination, where the Grail, unseen, Broke yet the darkness where a king saw nothing-- Feared now the lady Vivian more than Fate; For now he knew that Modred, Lancelot, The Queen, the King, the Kingdom, and the World, Were less to Merlin, who had made him King, Than one small woman in Broceliande. Whereas the lady Vivian, seeing Merlin Acclaimed and tempted and allured again To service in his old magnificence, Feared now King Arthur more than storms and robbers; For Merlin, though he knew himself immune To no least whispered little wish of hers That might afflict his ear with ecstasy, Had yet sufficient of his old command Of all around him to invest an eye With quiet lightning, and a spoken word With easy thunder, so accomplishing A profit and a pastime for himself-- And for the lady Vivian, when her guile Outlived at intervals her graciousness; And this equipment of uncertainty, Which now had gone away with him to Britain With Dagonet, so plagued her memory That soon a phantom brood of goblin doubts Inhabited his absence, which had else Been empty waiting and a few brave fears, And a few more, she knew, that were not brave, Or long to be disowned, or manageable. She thought of him as he had looked at her When first he had acquainted her alarm At sight of the King's letter with its import; And she remembered now his very words: "The King believes today as in his boyhood That I am Fate," he said; and when they parted She had not even asked him not to go; She might as well, she thought, have bid the wind Throw no more clouds across a lonely sky Between her and the moon,--so great he seemed In his oppressed solemnity, and she, In her excess of wrong imagining, So trivial in an hour, and, after all A creature of a smaller consequence Than kings to Merlin, who made kings and kingdoms And had them as a father; and so she feared King Arthur more than robbers while she waited For Merlin's promise to fulfil itself, And for the rest that was to follow after: "He said he would come back, and so he will. He will because he must, and he is Merlin, The master of the world--or so he was; And he is coming back again to me Because he must and I am Vivian. It's all as easy as two added numbers: Some day I'll hear him ringing at the gate, As he rang on that morning in the spring, Ten years ago; and I shall have him then For ever. He shall never go away Though kings come walking on their hands and knees To take him on their backs." When Merlin came, She told him that, and laughed; and he said strangely: "Be glad or sorry, but no kings are coming. Not Arthur, surely; for now Arthur knows That I am less than Fate."