Not far from this place, Reverie informed me, were pitched the booths of Vanity Fair.  This, by his account, was a place one ought to visit, if only for the satisfaction of leaving it behind.  But I have heard more animated accounts of it elsewhere.

As for Reverie himself, he seemed only desirous to contemplate; never to taste, to win, or to handle.  He needed but refuse reality to what shocked or teased him, to find it harmless and entertaining.  He was a dreamer whom the heat and shout of battle could not offend.

Perhaps he perceived my restlessness to be gone, for he himself suggested that I should stay till the next morning, and then, if I so pleased, he would see me a mile or two on my way.

“For the Pitiless Lady,” he said, smiling, “takes many disguises, sometimes of the sun, sometimes of evening, sometimes of night; and I would at least save you from the fate that has made my poor friend a phantom before he is a shade.”

XII

    The many men, so beautiful! 
    And they all dead did lie.

    —­S.T.  Coleridge.

So Reverie, as he had promised, rode out with me a few miles to see me on my way.  Above the gloom and stillness of the valley the scene began to change again.  I was glad as I could be to view once more the tossing cornfields and the wind at play with shadow.  Near and far, woods and pastures smoked beneath the sun.  I know not through how many arches of the elms and green folds of the meadows I kept watch on the chimneys of a farmhouse above its trees.

But Reverie, the further we journeyed, the less he said.  I almost chafed to see his heedless eyes turned upon some inward dream, while here, like life itself, stood cloud and oak, warbled bird and brook beneath the burning sun.  I saw again in memory the silver twilight of the moon, and the crazy face of Love’s Warrior, haunter of shade.  Let him but venture into the open, I thought, hear again the distant lowing of the oxen, the rooks cawing in the elms, see again the flocks upon the hillside!

I suppose this was her home my heart had turned to.  This was my dust; night’s was his.  For me the wild rose and the fields of harvest; for him closed petals, the chantry of the night wind, phantom lutes and voices.  And, as if he had overheard my thoughts, Reverie turned at the cross-ways.

“You will come back again,” he said.  “They tell me in distant lands men worship Time, set up a shrine to him in every street, and treasure his emblem next their hearts.  There, they say, even the lover babbles of hours, and the dreamer measures sleep with a pendulum.  Well, my house is secluded, and the world is far; and to me Time is naught.  Return, sir, then, when it pleases you.  Besides,” he added, smiling faintly, “there is always company at the World’s End.”

The crisp sunbeams rained upon his pale and delicate horse, its equal-plaited mane, on the darkness of his cloak, that dream-delighted face.  Here smouldered gold, here flushed crimson, and here the curved damaskening of his bridle glistened and gleamed.  He was a strange visitant to the open day, between the green hedges, beneath the enormous branching of the elms.  And there I bade him farewell.