"Seest thou thy prisoner?" she asked. "Forever thy prisoner!" From its fellow of watchet blue she detached her floating silver sleeve. "It is my favor," she whispered. "Wear it when thou wilt." He folded the gauze and thrust it within his doublet. "When I may, my lady," he said, with his eyes upon the sunset that held the colors of the dawning. "When I may." A sickle moon swung in the gold harvest-fields of the west, then a great star came out to watch that reaping. The thrush was silent now, but from a covert rushed suddenly the full tide of a nightingale's song. With a cry the maid of honor put hands to her ears. "Ay me, my heart it will break! Tell me that thou goest but to come again!" He took her hands, pressing them to his heart, to his lips. "No, no, my dearest dear, since God no longer worketh miracles! I go more surely than ever went John Oxenham; I would not have thee cheat thyself, spend thy days in watching, listening. I kiss thee a lifetime good-by.... Oh child, seest thou how broken I am? I that myself loosed all the winds--I that kneel, a penitent, before the just and the unjust, before my lover and my foe! But when all's said, all's done, all's quiet:--the arrow sped, the stone fallen, the curfew rung, the dust returned to dust! then shall stand my soul.... A ruined man, a man in just disgrace, who hath played the coward, who hath sinned against thee and against others, that am I--yet our souls endure, and thou art my mate; queenly as thou standest here, thou art my mate! I love thee, and in life, in death, I claim thee still: Forget me not when I am gone!" "When thou art gone!" she cried. "When thou art gone with all my mind I'll hold myself thy bride! In those strange countries beneath the sun if bitterness comes over thee"--she put her hand to her heart--"think of thy fireside here. Think, 'Even in this wavering life I have an abiding home, a heart that's true, true, true to me!' When thou diest--if thou diest first--linger for me; where a thousand years are as a day travel not so far that I may not overtake thee. Mortimer, Mortimer, Mortimer! I'll not believe in a God who at the last says not to me, 'That path he took.' When He says it, listen for my flying feet. Oh, my dear, listen for my flying feet!" "Star and rose!" he said. "If we dream, we dream. Better so, even though we pass to sleep too deep for dreaming. For we plan a temple though we build it not.... That falconer's whistle! is it thy signal? Then thou must make no tarrying here. I will put thy cloak about thee."