XXVIII. ‘LOVE IS NOT OLD, AS WHAN THAT IT IS NEW’ 305 XXIX. ‘I MEANE WELL, BY GOD THAT SIT ABOVE’ 319 XXX. ‘THER WAS NO WIGHT, TO WHOM SHE DURSTE PLAIN’ 330 XXXI. ‘I WOLDE LIVE IN PEES, IF THAT I MIGHT’ 342 XXXII. ‘FOR LOVE AND NOT FOR HATE THOU MUST BE DED’ 349 XXXIII. ‘IS THERE NO GRACE? IS THERE NO REMEDIE?’ 358 XXXIV. ‘SENS LOVE HATH BROUGHT US TO THIS PITEOUS END’ 373 ASPHODEL CHAPTER I. ‘AND SHE WAS FAIR AS IS THE ROSE IN MAY.’ ‘Oh, you glorious old Sol, how I love you!’ cried Daphne. It was a day on which common mortals were almost fainting with the heat, puffing and blowing and complaining—a blazing midsummer-day; and even here, in the forest of Fontainebleau, where the mere idea of innumerable trees was suggestive of shadow and coolness, the heat was barely supportable—a heavy slumberous heat, loud with the hum of millions of insects, perfumed with the breath of a thousand pines. Daphne revelled in the fierce sunshine—she threw back her crest of waving hair, bright as yellow gold, she smiled up at the cloudless blue, she looked unwinkingly even at Sol himself, the mighty unquenchable king of the sky, glorious yonder in his highest heaven. She was lying at full length on a moss-grown block of stone at the top of a hill, which was one of the highest points in the forest, a hill-top overlooking on one side a fair sweep of champagne country, fertile valleys, church steeples, village roofs, vineyards and rose gardens, and winding streams; and on the other side, woodlands stretching away into infinite distance, darkly purple. It was the choicest spot in a forest which, at its best, is a poor thing compared with the immemorial growth of an old English wood. Here there are no such oaks and beeches as our Hampshire forest can show—no such lovely mystical glades—no such richness of undergrowth. Everything seems of yesterday, save here and there a tree that looks as if he had seen something of bygone generations, and here and there a wreck of an ancient oak, proudly labelled ‘The Great Pharamond,’ or ‘_Le Chêne de Henri IV._,’ with a placard hung round his poor old neck to say that he is not to be damaged ‘on pain of amend.’ Such Pharamonds and Henris abound in the forest where Rufus was killed, and nobody heeds them. The owls build in them, the field-mice find shelter in them, the woodpecker taps at them, unscared by placards or the threat of an amend.