Damaris quite left her work upon Bathsheba’s long gold tresses and sat with idle hands, her level gaze upon nothing short of the great highway of the sea and certain ships thereon.  Where now was the ship?—­off what green island, what strange, rich shore?

On went the gentleman pensioner. “’I can better take a blister of a nettle than a prick of a rose; more willing that a raven should peck out my eyes than a dove.  To die of the meat one liketh not is better than to surfeit of that he loveth; and I had rather an enemy should bury me quick than a friend belie me when I am dead.’”

The reader made pause and received his due of soft plaudits.  But Damaris dreamed on, the gold thread loose between her fingers.  She was the fairest there, and the gentleman was piqued because she looked not at him, but at some fine Arachne web of her own weaving.

“Sweet Mistress Damaris—­” he began; and again, “Fair Mistress Damaris—­” but Damaris was counting days and heard him not.  A lesser beauty left her work upon King David’s crown to laugh aloud, with some malice and some envy in her mirth.  “Prithee, let her alone!  She will dream thus even in the presence.  But I have a spell will make her awaken.”  She leaned forward and called “Dione!” then with renewed laughter sank back into her seat.  “Lo! you now—­”

The maid of honor, who at her own name stirred not, at the name of a poet’s giving had started from her dream with widened eyes and an exquisite blush.  The startled face which for one moment she showed her laughing mates was of a beauty so intelligent and divine that, was it so she looked, a many King Davids had found excuse for loving one Bathsheba.  Then the inner light which had so informed every feature sought again its shrine, and Mistress Damaris Sedley, who was of a nature admirably poised and a wit most ready, lifted with the latest French shrug the jest from her own shoulders to those of another:  “Oh, madam! was it you who spoke?  Surely I thought it was your dead starling that you taught to call you by that name—­but whose neck you wrung when it called it once too often!”

Having shot her forked shaft and come off victor, she smiled so sweetly upon the gentleman pensioner that for such ample thanks he had been reading still had she not risen, laid her work aside, and with a deep and graceful courtesy to the merry group left the room.  When she was gone one sighed, and another laughed, and a third breathed, “O the heavens! to love and be loved like that!”

Damaris threaded the palace ways until she reached the chamber which she shared with a laughter-loving girl from her own countryside.  Closed and darkened was the little room, but the maid of honor, moving to the window, drew the hangings and let the sunshine in.  From a cabinet she took a book in manuscript, then with it in her hands knelt upon the window-seat and looked out upon the Thames.  She did not read what was written upon the leaves; those canzones and