Their speech goes breathlessly.

MICHAEL

Quick!—­tell me—­

Piper
  Patience.

Michael
  Patience?—­Death and hell! 
Oh, save her—­save her!  Give the children back.

Piper
Never.  Have you betrayed us?

Michael
  I!—­betrayed?

Piper
So, so, lad.

Michael
  But to save her—­

Piper
  There’s a way,—­
Trust me!  I save her, or we swing together
Merrily, in a row.—­How did you see her?

Michael
By stealth:  two days ago, at evening,
Hard by the vine-hid wall of her own garden,
I made a warbling like a nightingale;
And she came out to hear.

Piper
  A serenade! 
Under the halter!

Michael
  Hush.—­A death-black night,
Until she came.—­Oh, how to tell thee, lad! 
She came,—­she came, not for the nightingale,
But even dreaming that it would be I!

Piper
She knew you?—­We are trapped, then.

Michael
  No, not so! 
She smiled on me.—­Dost thou remember how
She smiled on me that day?  Alas, poor maid,
She took me for some noble in disguise! 
And all these days,—­she told me,—­she had dreamed
That I would come to save her!

Piper
  Said she this?

Michael
All this—­all this, and more! . . . 
What could lies do?—­I lied to her of thee;
I swore I knew not of thy vanishment,
Nor the lost children.  But I told her true,
I was a stroller and an outcast man
That hid there, like a famished castaway,
For one more word, without a hope,—­a hope;
Helpless to save her.

Piper
  And she told thee then,
She goes to be a nun?

Michael
  Youth to the grave! 
And I—­vile nothing—­cannot go to save her,
Only to look my last—­

Piper
  Who knows?

Michael
[bitterly]
  Ah, thou!—­

Piper
Poor Nightingale!
[Fingers Us pipe, noiselessly.]

Michael
[rapt with grief]
  Oh, but the scorn of her!

Piper
She smiled on thee.

Michael
  Until she heard the truth:—­
A juggler,—­truly,—­and no wandering knight! 
Oh, and she wept.
[Wildly]
  Let us all hang together.

Piper
Thanks.  Kindly spoken.—­Not this afternoon!

Michael
Thou knowest they are given up for dead?

Piper
Truly.

Michael
  Bewitched?

Piper
  So are they.

Michael
  Sold to the Devil?