Many an owner has done more for a slave who had done less for him." "And you would have regarded it as fair if your uncle had taken any of those methods of recompensing Agathemer ?" "Certainly!" I affirmed.
"Then why, in the name of Mercury," he demanded, "didn't you free Agathemer the moment the will was read ?" "I have told you over and over," I retorted impatiently, "that my uncle's will enjoined me not to free Agathemer within five years, though he also enjoined that I was to make a new will at once so as to leave Agathemer free and recompensed if I died before the five years elapsed." "But the injunction was not binding," Tanno persisted, "either in law or by religious custom.

No dead man can prevent his heirs freeing slaves he leaves them.

Why heed the injunction ?" "I could not contravene so explicit a behest of the dead," I demurred, "especially of a man I loved and revered.

And you must recall my uncle's queer habit of acting on intuitions and the way he expressed them, always saying: "'It has been revealed to me that....' And his intuitions always seemed to amount to prevision, he never seemed to have acted amiss, however eccentric his act, however baseless his premonition.

I have a feeling that in Agathemer's case he acted on some such presentiment." Tanno turned to Agathemer.
"Do you feel that way too ?" he demanded.
"I most certainly do," said Agathemer, "I have a feeling that my remaining a slave is going to be of vital service to Hedulio, somehow, sometime." "Then you are content to remain a slave ?" Tanno queried.
"No one wants to remain a slave," Agathemer confessed, "and every slave longs to be a free man and is impatient to be free at once.