Ralph said, “Even so much I deemed by reading in the book; yet it was not told clearly that thou hadst been there.”  “Yea,” she said, because the said book was made not by my friends but my foes, and they would have men deem that my length of days and the endurance of my beauty and never-dying youth of my heart came from evil and devilish sources; and if thou wilt trust my word it is not so, for in the Well at the World’s End is no evil, but only the Quenching of Sorrow, and Clearing of the Eyes that they may behold.  And how good it is that they look on thee now.  And moreover, the history of that book is partly false of intention and ill-will, and partly a confused medley of true and false, which has come of mere chance-hap.

“Hearken now,” she said, “till I tell thee in few words what befell me before I came to drink the Water of the Well.  After we had passed long deserts of wood and heath, and gone through lands exceeding evil and perilous, and despaired of life for the horror of those places, and seen no men, we came at last amongst a simple folk who dealt kindly with us, yea, and more.  These folk seemed to me happy and of good wealth, though to my lord they seemed poor and lacking of the goods of the world.  Forsooth, by that time we lacked more than they, for we were worn with cold and hunger, and hard life:  though for me, indeed, happy had been the days of my wayfaring, but my lord remembered the days of his riches and the kingdom of his father, and the worship of mighty men, and all that he had promised me on the happy day when I first beheld him:  so belike he was scarce so happy as I was.

“It was springtime when we came to that folk; for we had worn through the autumn and winter in getting clear of the wilderness.  Not that the way was long, as I found out afterwards, but that we went astray in the woodland, and at last came out of it into a dreadful stony waste which we strove to cross thrice, and thrice were driven back into the greenwood by thirst and hunger; but the fourth time, having gotten us store of victual by my woodcraft, we overpassed it and reached the peopled country.

“Yea, spring was on the earth, as we, my lord and I, came down from the desolate stony heaths, and went hand and hand across the plain, where men and women of that folk were feasting round about the simple roofs and woodland halls which they had raised there.  Then they left their games and sports and ran to us, and we walked on quietly, though we knew not whether the meeting was to be for death or life.  But that kind folk gathered round us, and asked us no story till they had fed us, and bathed us, and clad us after their fashion.  And then, despite the nakedness and poverty wherein they had first seen us, they would have it that we were gods sent down to them from the world beyond the mountains by their fathers of old time; for of Holy Church, and the Blessed Trinity, and the Mother of God they knew no more than did I at that time, but were heathen, as the Gentiles of yore agone.  And even when we put all that Godhood from us, and told them as we might and could what we were (for we had no heart to lie to such simple folk), their kindness abated nothing, and they bade us abide there, and were our loving friends and brethren.