a god wooed
them. Yes, then I understood. How long ago it seems!"

"Yes, yes," he sighed. "In that full-blooded season was Guenevere a
lass, I think, and Charlemagne was not yet in breeches."

"And when there was a new play enacted I was glad. For it was our play
that you and I had polished the last line of yesterday, and all these
people wept and laughed because of what we had done. And I was
proud----" The lady shrugged impatiently. "Proud, did I say? and
glad? That attests how woefully I fall short of you, my poet. You
would have found some magic phrase to make that ancient glory
articulate, I know. Yet,--did I ever love you? I do not know that. I
only know I sometimes fear you robbed me of the power of loving any
other man."

He raised one hand in deprecation. "I must remind you," he cried,
whimsically, "that a burnt child dreads even to talk of fire."

Her response was a friendly nod. She came yet nearer. "What," she
demanded, and her smile was elfish, "what if I had lied to you? What
if I were hideously tired of my husband, that bluff, stolid captain?
What if I wanted you to plead with me as in the old time?"

He said: "Until now you were only a woman. Oh, and now, my dear, you
are again that resistless gipsy who so merrily beguiled me to the very
heart of loss. You are Love. You are Youth. You are Comprehension.
You are all that I have had, and lost, and vainly hunger for. Here in
this abominable village, there is no one who understands--not even
those who are more dear to me than you are. I know. I only spoil good
paper which might otherwise be profitably used to wrap herrings in,
they think. They give me ink and a pen just as they would give toys to
a child who squalled for them too obstinately. And Poesy is a thrifty
oracle with no words to waste upon the deaf, however loudly her
interpreter cry out to her. Oh, I have hungered for you, my proud,
dark lady!" the playmaker said.

Afterward they stood quite silent. She was not unmoved by his outcry;
and for this very reason was obscurely vexed by the reflection that it
would be the essay of a braver man to remedy, rather than to lament,
his circumstances. And then the moment's rapture failed him.

"I am a sorry fool," he said; and lightly he ran on: "You are a
skilful witch. Yet you have raised the ghost of an old madness to no
purpose. You seek a master-poet? You will find none here. Perhaps I
was one once. But most of