a thing to be so sad.  She made no parade of grief.  Faint smiles came and went, and all things added to her birthright of grace.  She was the Countess’s almoner:  every day she did good, lessening pain, whispering balm to the anguish-stricken, speaking as with authority to troubled souls.  Back from the hovel to stately houses she went, and lo! the maid of honor, exquisite, perfect as a flower.  Men wooed, but might not win her.  They came and went, but to her it was no matter.  In her eyes still burned the patient splendor with which she waited for the tide to take her, bearing her out beyond the shallows to one who also tarried.

With a gentle sound the fountain rose and fell in a gray stone basin.  Around it were set the rose-trees, and beyond the roses tall box and yew most fantastically clipped screened from observation the fairy spot.  Damaris, slowly entering, became at once the spirit of the place.  She paced the fountain’s grassy rim to a rustic seat and took it for her chair of state, from which for a while, with her white hands behind her head, she watched the silver spray and the blue midsummer sky.  A lark sang, but so high in the blue that its joyous note jarred not the languor of the place.  Damaris opened her book—­but what need of written poesy?  The red roses smelled so sweet that ’twas as though she lay against the heart of one royal bloom.  She left her throne and trod the circle, and in both hands she took the heavy blossoms and pressed them to her lips.  The odor was like warm wine.  “Now and for all my life,” said Damaris, “for me one faded rose!  Afterwards, two in a garden like this—­like this!”

The grass was so green and warm that presently she lay down upon it, her head pillowed upon her arm, her eyes gazing through the fountain mist and down the emerald slopes to where ran the elmwood avenue.  She gazed in idleness, through half-shut eyelids, wrapped in lullabies and drowsy warmth.  Hoof-beats between the elms troubled her not.  When through the mist of falling water and the veil of drooping leaves she saw riding towards the house a youth clad in blue, the horse and rider seemed but figures in a piece of tapestry.  Her satin eyelids closed, and if other riders presently showed in the tapestry she saw them not, for she was sound asleep.  She dreamed of a masque at Hampton Court, long ago, and of the gown she had worn and how merry she had been, and she dreamed of the Queen.  Then her dream changed and she sat with Henry Sedley on the sands of a lost sea-coast, stretching in pale levels beyond the ken of man.  The surf raced towards them like shadowy white horses, and a red moon hung low in the sky.  There was music in the air, and his voice was speaking, but suddenly the sea and its champing horses and the red moon passed away.  She stirred, and now it was not her brother’s voice that spoke.  Green grass was beneath her; splendid roses, red and gold, were censers slowly swinging; the silver fountain leaped as if to meet the skylark’s song.  Slowly Damaris raised herself from her grassy bed and looked with widening eyes upon an intruder.  “I—­I went to sleep,” she said.  “Is’t Heaven or will this rose also fade?” She closed her eyes for a moment, then, opening them, “O my dream!” she cried.  “Go not away!”