taking her work to the Cathedral Town to
sell; and with the proceeds buying what she needed, and other cloths
and silk and gold with which to work. She opened the coffer in Hobb's
lodge and showed him what she did: veils that she had embroidered with
cobwebs hung with dew, so that you feared to touch them lest you should
destroy the cobweb and disperse the dew; and girdles thick-set with
flowers, so that you thought Spring's self on a warm day had loosed the
girdle from her middle, and lost it; and gowns worked like the feathers
of a bird, some like the plumage on the wood-dove's breast, and others
like a jay's wing; and there was a pair of blue skippers so embroidered
that they appeared and disappeared beneath a flowing skirt with reeds
and sallows rising from a hem of water, you thought you had seen
kingfishers; and there were tunics overlaid with dragonflies' wings and
their delicate jointed bodies of green and black-and-yellow and
Chalk-Hill blue; and caps all gay with autumn berries, scarlet
rose-hips and wine-red haws, and the bright briony, and spindle with
its twofold gayety, and one cap was all of wild clematis, with the vine
of the Traveler's Joy twined round the brim and the cloud of the Old
Man's Beard upon the crown. And Hobb said, "It is magic. Who taught you
to do this?" And Margaret said, "Open Winkins."

Early in their talks he told her of his garden, and of the golden rose
he tried to grow there, and of his failures; and Margaret knew by his
voice and his eyes more than by his words that this was the wish of his
heart. And she smiled and said, "Now I know with what I must redeem my
promise. Yet I think I shall be jealous of your golden rose." And Hobb,
lifting a wave of her glittering hair and making a rose of it between
his fingers, asked, "How can you be jealous of yourself?" "Yet I think
I am," said she again, "for it was something of myself you promised to
give me presently, and I would rather have something of you." "They are
the same thing," said Hobb, and he twisted up the great rose of her
hair till it lay beside her temple under the ebony fillet. And as his
hand touched the fillet he looked puzzled, and he ran his finger round
its shining blackness and exclaimed, "But this too is hair!" Margaret
laughed her strange laugh and said, "Yes, my own hair, you discoverer
of open secrets!" And putting up her hands she unbound the fillet, and
it fell, a slender coil of black amongst the golden flood of