Gyll went to the extreme of flippancy. “Come,” she said. “Look at King Lud. Let him give us his blessing. Let him tie the knot with his great paws upon our heads. I much mislike real parsons; we will have none o’ them. I’ll bind myself to no man. ‘Please one, please all,’ as the song hath it—‘please one, please all.’” So saying, she was on the point of profaning her troth by kneeling, with a laugh, before the bear, when a glance at Prat restrained her. The soldier had started back with an oath. His eyes, enraged as she had never seen them, were lowering, and his breath came quickly. With one hand he ground the bear’s chain until its links grated as if they must break in the tight-clinched fist, while with the other he sought his hip, and the fat palm ignored his flute and Uppowac pipe to cool itself on the metal of his sword. Gyll drew back in amaze. “How now, goblin,” she asked, with not a little terror; “art gone wholly mad?” He said nothing, but slowly his expression altered until a mingling of grief and cold repulsion told her of his inward change. “I would have risked a wedding,” he said, at last, and drawing the bear to his side. “I would have made you honest wife, and not ungladly, for I felt a kind o’ love—ah, a deal o’ love—for you, Gyll; but I’m a peculiar personage, and not irreverent to men o’ God and church-like things, be I rake or no. Faith, ye’re a most heartless jade, who’ll ne’er be wife o’ mine. Ye’ve shown yourself. For that I thank thee;” whereat he turned on his heel and, leading away King Lud, disappeared in the forest. For a moment Gyll stood listening, and once she called, but only the clank, clank of the bear’s chain, growing fainter and more faint in the distance, answered her unhappy cry. Finally, when the sound had died, a flood of tears fell from her eyes, but quickly she brushed them away, then, turning, walked in the direction of the shore, and forced from her tremulous lips a song, popular at the time in Southwark: “Be merry, friends, and take no thought; For worldly cares now care ye naught, For whoso doth, when all is fought, Shall find that thought availeth not— Be merry, friends.” Her voice sounded low, its lilt for once seeming artificial. The friends she strove to cheer were her own thoughts—new, discomforting thoughts—yet perhaps more truly friends than all their predecessors. She persisted, however, in drowning the inward mutter of their realization with her voice’s melody: “To take our sorrows mournfully, Augmenteth but our malady; But taking sorrows merrily Maketh them smaller, verily— Be merry, friends.” And now the notes of a flute came to her from afar, half in accompaniment of her tune: “Let the world slide, let the world go; A fig for care and a fig for woe! If I can’t pay, why, I can owe; And death makes equal the high and low— Be merry, friends!”