“Why are you weeping?” I said.

“I was imitating a little brook,” she said.

“It is late; the bat is up; yet you are alone,” I said.

“Pan will protect me,” she said.

“And nought else?”

She turned her face away.  “None,” she said.  “I live among shadows.  There was a world, I dreamed, where autumn follows summer, and after autumn, winter.  Here it is always June, despite us both.”

“What, then, would you have?” I said.

“Ask him,” she replied.

But the little god looking sidelong was mute in his grey regard.

“Why do you not run away?  What keeps you here?”

“You ask many questions, stranger!  Who can escape?  To live is to remember.  To die—­oh, who would forget!  Even had I been weeping, and not merely mocking time away, would my tears be of Lethe at my mouth’s corners?  No,” said Anthea, “why feign and lie?  All I am is but a memory lovely with regret.”

She rose, and the myrtles concealed her from me.  And I, in the midst of the dusk where the tiny torches burned sadly—­I turned to the sightless eyes of that smiling god.

What he knew, being blind, yet smiling, I seemed to know then.  But that also I have forgotten.

I whistled softly and clearly into the air, and a querulous voice answered me from afar—­the voice of a grasshopper—­Rosinante’s.

V

    How should I your true love know
    From another one?

    —­WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

But even then she was difficult finding, so cunningly had ivy and blackberry and bindweed woven snares for the trespasser’s foot.

But at last—­not far from where we had parted—­I found her, a pillar of smoke in the first shining of the moon.  She turned large, smouldering eyes on me, her mane in elf locks, her flanks heaving and wet, her forelock frizzed like a colt’s.  Yet she showed only pleasure at seeing me, and so evident a desire to unburden the day’s history, that I almost wished I might be Balaam awhile, and she—­Dapple!

It would be idle to attempt to ride through these thick, glimmering brakes.  The darkness was astir.  And as the moon above the valley brightened, casting pale beams upon the folded roses and drooping branches, if populous dream did not deceive me, a tiny multitude was afoot in the undergrowth—­small horns winding, wee tapers burning.

Presently as with Rosinante’s nose at my shoulder we pushed slowly forward, a nightingale burst close against my ear into so passionate a descant I thought I should be gooseflesh to the end of my days.

The heedless tumult of her song seemed to give courage to sounds and voices much fainter.  Soon a lovelit rival in some distant thicket broke into song, and far and near their voices echoed above the elfin din of timbrel and fife and hunting-horn.  I began to wish the moon away that dazzled my eyes, yet could not muffle my ears.