Belgrade whirled to his companion. “You understand now?”
“They’re tolling——”
“Of course. It’s for you, I suppose—they’re mourning you as dead. Where did the custom come from, Weismann, I wonder? I thought it was modern——”
But Dian herself could not have told him this. She only knew that ever since the mountain-god had given bronze to the tribe, they had thus sounded the gong at the burial of the great chiefs. Only twice in the last quarter of a century had these solemn, solitary tones rolled out to awe the villagers: at the death of her mother and of her father Morrison Chief. Always it betokened national mourning.
“They’re paying you the highest honor in the gift of the tribe,” Belgrade said.
At the first gong, the sound of revelry in the village instantly died away. Like a bank of f
