“Nay, stay,” he called, apprehensively; “stay, and permit me to collect my scattered wits.” She turned and laughed with scornful badinage. “Stay?” she echoed; “and wherefore, pray? Merely that you may blow tobacco fumes into my eyes and blind them to the charm of your countenance?” “Oh no,” he remonstrated. “In troth, I blew the smoke to hide the face of his wondering majesty above. His red eyes and sniffing snout seemed to condemn and scorn me. There, I’ll smoke no more,” and, knocking out the pipe’s ashes, he restored it quickly to his belt. Seeming to be mollified by this, Gyll sat down again on the grass, while the new softness of her expression returned. “Prithee, Roger, make up your mind on that which troubles it, for if again I start, I go, and there’s the end.” He gazed at her for a moment with solemn eyes, and now she smiled in an almost womanly way instead of laughing wantonly. “Tell me, Gyll, dost really—dost truly?—” but he broke off for want of a word. “Truly what?” she asked, in a low voice. His chin sank into its underfolds again, and he twirled a pair of globular thumbs tentatively. “Dost truly have that feeling for me which the poet would call ‘love’?” The question touched her sense of the ludicrous keenly, yet his astonishing earnestness underlying it must have reached a deeper sense, for still she only smiled instead of laughing, and answered, “Yes.” At this his rotund face grew brighter. “Come, then, to the Oxford preacher, Gyll, before we change our minds;” and, nothing loath, she rose quietly. “Change our minds, Roger! I, for one, shall ne’er do that.” “Nay,” he said, “nay, I pray you, do not change. Oh, that would be dire misfortune;” whereon, picking up the end of King Lud’s chain, which dangled from the tree, he tugged thereat until the beast, with a good-humored growl, descended. For an instant the sight of her animal friend brought the old, careless look to Gyll’s face—there was something so drolly suggestive of Roger in the bear’s bandy legs and awkward gait. A fit of devil-may-care recklessness seized her. The strain of even a moment’s seriousness on such a nature being unendurable, breaks in the end, and, as when a supporting rope is severed without warning the one who has been held thereby falls suddenly, so the snapping of a moral stay leaves one sprawling in abandonment.