certain things with it, and if one hated very
much, it was just as good, only one had to do different things, and we
played with it a long time, and pretended all sorts of things. Nurse
said her great-grandmother had told her all about these images, but what
we did was no harm at all, only a game. But she told me a story about
these images that frightened me very much, and that was what I
remembered that night when I was lying awake in my room in the pale,
empty darkness, thinking of what I had seen and the secret wood. Nurse
said there was once a young lady of the high gentry, who lived in a
great castle. And she was so beautiful that all the gentlemen wanted to
marry her, because she was the loveliest lady that anybody had ever
seen, and she was kind to everybody, and everybody thought she was very
good. But though she was polite to all the gentlemen who wished to marry
her, she put them off, and said she couldn't make up her mind, and she
wasn't sure she wanted to marry anybody at all. And her father, who was
a very great lord, was angry, though he was so fond of her, and he asked
her why she wouldn't choose a bachelor out of all the handsome young men
who came to the castle. But she only said she didn't love any of them
very much, and she must wait, and if they pestered her, she said she
would go and be a nun in a nunnery. So all the gentlemen said they
would go away and wait for a year and a day, and when a year and a day
were gone, they would come back again and ask her to say which one she
would marry. So the day was appointed and they all went away; and the
lady had promised that in a year and a day it would be her wedding day
with one of them. But the truth was, that she was the queen of the
people who danced on the hill on summer nights, and on the proper nights
she would lock the door of her room, and she and her maid would steal
out of the castle by a secret passage that only they knew of, and go
away up to the hill in the wild land. And she knew more of the secret
things than any one else, and more than any one knew before or after,
because she would not tell anybody the most secret secrets. She knew how
to do all the awful things, how to destroy young men, and how to put a
curse on people, and other things that I could not understand. And her
real name was the Lady Avelin, but the dancing people called her Cassap,
which meant somebody very wise, in the old language. And she was whiter
than any of them and ta