“Of your height.”

The lady shrugged.  “Oh, I like not your half-way people!  And her hair—­but halt!  We know her hair is dark: 

     ‘Ah, darkness loved beyond all light!’

Her eyes—­”

He bent his head, moving yet nearer to her.  “Her eyes—­her eyes are wonderful!  Where got you your eyes, Dione—­Dione?”

Crimsoning deeply, Damaris started up, the racket escaping her clasp, and her hands going out in a gesture of dismay and anger.  “Sir,—­sir,” she stammered, “since you make a mock of me, I will begone.  No, sir; let me pass!  Ah, ... how unworthy of you!”

Ferne had caught her by the wrists.  “No, no!  Dear lady, to whom I am wellnigh a stranger—­sweetheart with whom I have talked scarce thrice in all my life—­my Dione, to whom my heart is as a crystal, to whom I have written all things!  I must speak now, now before I go this voyage!  Think you it is in me to vex with saucy words, to make a mock of any gentle lady?”

“I know not what to think,” she answered, in a strange voice.  “I am too dull to understand.”

“Think that I tell you God’s truth!” he cried.  “Understand that—­” He checked himself, seeing how pale she was and how flutteringly came her breath; then, trained as she herself to instantly draw an airy veil between true feeling and the exigency of the moment, he became once more the simple courtier.  “You read the songs that I make, sweet lady,” he said, “and now will you listen while I tell you a story, a novelle?  So I may make you to understand.”

As he spoke he motioned to the mossy bank which she had quitted.  She raised her troubled eyes to his; then, with her scarlet lip between her teeth, she took her seat again.  For a minute there was silence in the little grove, broken only by the distant voices of the players whose company she had forsworn; then Ferne began his story: 

“In a fair grassy plain, not many leagues removed from the hill Parnassus, a shepherd named Cleon sat upon a stone, piping to himself while he watched his sheep, and now and then singing aloud, so that the other shepherds and dwellers of the plain, and travellers through it, paused to hear his song.  He sang not often, and often he laid his pipe aside, for he had much to think of, having been upon the other side of the mountain, and having seen cities and camps and courts,—­for indeed he was not always shepherd.  And now, because his thoughts left the plain to hover over the place where danger is, to visit strange coasts and Ultima Thule, to strain ever towards those islands of the blest where goes the man who has endured to the end, his notes when he sang or when he played became warlike, resolved, speaking of death and fame and stern things, or of things of public weal....  But all the time the shepherd was a lonely man, because his spirit was too busy to find ease for itself, and because, though he had helped other shepherds in the building of their cottages,