irmanent of buds and glow-worms, to seek the poor
Rosinante I had so heedlessly deserted.

But I was gone but a little way when I was brought suddenly to a
standstill by another sound that in the hush of the garden, in the
bright languor after sleep, went to my heart: it was as if a child
were crying.

I pushed through a thick and aromatic clump of myrtles, and peering
between the narrow leaves, perceived the cold, bright face of a little
marble god beneath willows; and, seated upon a starry bank near by,
one whom by the serpentry of her hair and the shadow of her lips I
knew to be Anthea.

"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