"Poor Chanticleer! Poor John o' Dreams!" he said gently. "I have often wished my honey were not so bitter to the taste. Believe me, Chanticleer, I fain would find an antidote to the bitter herb of life, but none grows this side of the hills--or the other." "And yet ... I have never tasted fairy fruit," said Master Nathaniel in a low broken voice. "There are many trees in my orchard, and many and various are the fruit they bear--music and dreams and grief and, sometimes, joy. All your life, Chanticleer, you have eaten fairy fruit, and some day, it may be, you will hear the Note again--but that I cannot promise. And now I will grant you a vision--they are sometimes sweet to the taste." He paused. And then he said, "Do you know why it was that your horse fell down dead? It was because you had reached the brink of Fairyland. The winds of Faerie slew him. Come with me, Chanticleer." He took Master Nathaniel's hand and dragged him to his feet, and they scrambled a few yards further up the bridle-path and stepped on to a broad plateau. Beneath them lay what, in the uncertain moonlight, looked like a stretch of desolate uplands. Then Duke Aubrey raised his arms high above his head and cried out in a loud voice, "By the Sun, Moon and Stars and the Golden Apples of the West!" At these words the uplands became bathed in a gentle light and proved to be fair and fertile--the perpetual seat of Spring; for there were vivid green patches of young corn, and pillars of pink and white smoke, which were fruit trees in blossom, and pillars of blue blossom, which was the smoke of distant hamlets, and a vast meadow of cornflowers and daisies, which was the great inland sea of Faerie. And everything--ships, spires, houses--was small and bright and delicate, yet real. It was not unlike Dorimare, or rather, the transfigured Dorimare he had once seen from the Fields of Grammary. And as he gazed he knew that in that land no winds ever howled at night, and that everything within its borders had the serenity and stability of trees, the unchanging peace of pictures. Then, suddenly, it all vanished. Duke Aubrey had vanished too, and he was standing alone on the edge of a black abyss, while wafted on the wind came the echo of light, mocking laughter. Was Fairyland, then, a delusion? Had Ranulph vanished into nothingness? For a second or two he hesitated, and then--he leaped down into the abyss. CHAPTER XXIX A MESSAGE COMES TO HAZEL AND THE FIRST SWALLOW TO DAME MARIGOLD