"Oh, well," said I, and stretched myself at her feet, full length,--which is supposed to be a picturesque attitude,--"why quarrel over a name? It ought to be Gamelyn, anyhow; and, moreover, by the kindness of fate, Orlando is golfing." Rosalind frowned, dubiously. "But golf is a very ancient game," I reassured her. Then I bit a pine-needle in two and sighed. "Foolish fellow, when he might be--" "Admiring the beauties of nature," she suggested. Just then an impudent breeze lifted a tendril of honey-coloured hair and toyed with it, over a low, white brow,--and I noted that Rosalind's hair had a curious coppery glow at the roots, a nameless colour that I have never observed anywhere else.... "Yes," said I, "of nature." "Then," queried she, after a pause, "who are you? And what do you in this forest?" "You see," I explained, "there were conceivably other men in Arden--" "I suppose so," she sighed, with exemplary resignation. "--For you were," I reminded her, "universally admired at your uncle's court,--and equally so in the forest. And while Alfred--or, strictly speaking, Gamelyn, or, if you prefer it, Orlando,--is the great love of your life, still--" "Men are so foolish!" said Rosalind, irrelevantly. "--it did not prevent you--" "Me!" cried she, indignant. "You had such a tender heart," I suggested, "and suffering was abhorrent to your gentle nature." "I don't like cynicism, sir," said she; "and inasmuch as tobacco is not yet discovered--" "It is clearly impossible that I am smoking," I finished; "quite true." "I don't like cheap wit, either," said Rosalind. "You," she went on, with no apparent connection, "are a forester, with a good cross-bow and an unrequited attachment,--say, for me. You groan and hang verses and things about on the trees." "But I don't write verses--any longer," I amended. "Still how would this do,--for an oak, say,-- "I found a lovely centre-piece Upon the supper-table, But when I looked at it again I saw I wasn't able, And so I took my mother home And locked her in the stable." She considered that the plot of this epic was not sufficiently inevitable. It hadn't, she lamented, a quite logical ending; and the plot of it, in fine, was not, somehow, convincing. "Well, in any event," I optimistically reflected, "I am a nickel in. If your dicta had emanated from a person in Peoria or Seattle, who hadn't bothered to read my masterpiece, they would have sounded exactly the same, and the clipping-bureau would have charged me five cents. Maybe I can't write verses, then. But I am quite sure I can groan." And I did so. "It sounds rather like a fog-horn," said Rosalind, still in the critic's vein; "but I suppose it is the proper thing. Now," she continued, and quite visibly brightening, "you can pretend to have an unrequited attachment for me." "But I can't--" I decisively said.