from Crimthann.

"Halt there!" cried the king.

"Who should I halt for?" the lady demanded, halting all the same, as is
the manner of women, who rebel against command and yet receive it.

"Halt for Dermod!"

"There are Dermods and Dermods in this world," she quoted.

"There is yet but one Ard-Ri'," the monarch answered.

She then descended from the chariot and made her reverence.

"I wish to know your name?" said he.

But at this demand the lady frowned and answered decidedly:

"I do not wish to tell it."

"I wish to know also where you come from and to what place you are
going?"

"I do not wish to tell any of these things."

"Not to the king!"

"I do not wish to tell them to any one."

Crimthann was scandalised.

"Lady," he pleaded, "you will surely not withhold information from the
Ard-Ri'?"

But the lady stared as royally on the High King as the High King did on
her, and, whatever it was he saw in those lovely eyes, the king did not
insist.

He drew Crimthann apart, for he withheld no instruction from that lad.

"My heart," he said, "we must always try to act wisely, and we should
only insist on receiving answers to questions in which we are personally
concerned."

Crimthann imbibed all the justice of that remark.

"Thus I do not really require to know this lady's name, nor do I care
from what direction she comes."

"You do not?" Crimthann asked.

"No, but what I do wish to know is, Will she marry me?"

"By my hand that is a notable question," his companion stammered.

"It is a question that must be answered," the king cried triumphantly.
"But," he continued, "to learn what woman she is, or where she comes
from, might bring us torment as well as information. Who knows in what
adventures the past has engaged her!"

And he stared for a profound moment on disturbing, sinister horizons,
and Crimthann meditated there with him.

"The past is hers," he concluded, "but the future is ours, and we shall
only demand that which is pertinent to the future."

He returned to the lady.

"We wish you to be our wife," he said. And he gazed on her benevolently
and firmly and carefully when he said that, so that her regard could
not stray otherwhere. Yet, even as he looked, a tear did well into those
lovely eyes, and behind her brow a thought moved of the beautiful boy
who was looking at her from the king's side.

But when the High King of Ireland asks us to marry him we do not refuse,
for it is n