There are dames at Court would come barefoot to Virginia for so dazzling a bloom.  Why do you patch only upon the Whig side of the face?  Are you all of one camp, and does not one of you grow a white rosebush against the 29th of May?  May it please your Majesty the May Queen, I shall watch the sports from this seat upon your right hand.  Egad, the miller quits himself as though he were the moss-grown fellow of Sherwood Forest!”

The ice had thawed; and by the time the victorious miller had been pushed forward to receive the smart cocked hat which was the Virginia rendition of the crown of wild olive, it had quite melted.  Conversation became general, and food was found or made for laughter.  When the twelve fiddlers who succeeded the blacksmith and the miller came trooping upon the green, they played, one by one, to perhaps as light-hearted a company as a May Day ever shone upon.  All their tunes were gay and lively ones, and the younger men moved their feet to the music, while a Strephon at the lower end of the lists seized upon a blooming Chloe, and the two began to dance “as if,” quoth the Colonel, “the musicians were so many tarantula doctors.”

A flower-wreathed instrument of his calling went to the player of the sprightliest air; after which awardment, the fiddlers, each to the tune of his own choosing, marched off the green to make room for Pretty Bessee, her father the beggar, and her suitors the innkeeper, the merchant, the gentleman, and the knight.

The high, quick notes of the song suited the sunshiny weather, the sheen of the river, the azure skies.  A light wind brought from the orchard a vagrant troop of pink and white petals to camp upon the silken sleeve of Mistress Evelyn Byrd.  The gentleman sitting beside her gathered them up and gave them again to the breeze.

“It sounds sweetly enough,” he said, “but terribly old-fashioned:—­

    ’I weigh not true love by the weight of the purse,
        And beauty is beauty in every degree.’

That’s not Court doctrine.”

The lady to whom he spoke rested her cheek upon her hand, and looked past the singers to the blossoming slope and the sky above.  “So much the worse for the Court,” she said.  “So much the better for”—­

Haward glanced at her.  “For Virginia?” he ended, with a smile.  “Do you think that they do not weigh love with gold here in Virginia, Evelyn?  It isn’t really Arcady.”

“So much the better for some place, somewhere,” she answered quietly.  “I did not say Virginia.  Indeed, from what travelers like yourself have told me, I think the country lies not upon this earth.  But the story is at an end, and we must applaud with the rest.  It sounded sweetly, after all,—­though it was only a lying song.  What next?”

Her father, from his station beside the May Queen, caught the question, and broke the flow of his smiling compliments to answer it.  “A race between young girls, my love,—­the lucky fair who proves her descent from Atalanta to find, not a golden apple, but a golden guinea.  Here come from the sexton’s house the pretty light o’ heels!”