was to pass through pleasant champaigns and presently to dismount and lie at ease in shady places and read unceasing in the _Romance of the Rose_, and wonder unceasing if ever Good-Greeting would take him by the hand and lead him through the thicket to the place where the Holy Rose-bud awaited him. For Rainouart dreamed day and night of the rose that he had never found. He had sailed across the seas to Athens with a whole and lonely heart. Whole and lonely his heart had remained at the court of the Duke of Athens, though there, too, as at the court of Philip the Fair, beautiful women swarmed like butterflies, spreading out their colored wings in the ceaseless sunlight, and ever ready to smile their brightest when the young prince came a-nigh. But Rainouart paid them no heed. He was courteous to them because they were women; he disliked them because they were light women; he dreamed of a star. Not yet had he loved the loveliest or wooed the worthiest. III ARGATHONA Simon sat up and rubbed his eyes while he stared back at the damsel. At first he thought that he must unawares have slipped into sleep and that he was still dreaming. Primarily he had heard no sound of footsteps through the wood; further, the girl who faced him was radiantly unlike any woman he had ever seen--and Simon in his time had seen many women. To begin with, she was taller than is the wont of womanhood, seeming tall even to him, who carried four inches over six feet. This was the first thought in Simon's drowsy mind, surprise at the stranger's height; the next, as his brain escaped from the nets and snares of sleep, was conviction that the stranger's face was fairer than any woman's face he had ever seen awake or dreaming. It was beautiful with an unfamiliar type of beauty, though he remembered dimly some ancient statues once seen and little heeded in the garden of a house of pleasure in Byzantium whose features were like the features of this woman. Her head was nobly set upon her neck; her yellow hair was gathered into a knot above the nape; her eyes shone with the most wonderful, changeful blue--they were like the sea, they were like the sky, they were like the waters of forest fountains, the floods of mountain streams. Her comely, upright body was clothed in a kind of smock of white stuff girdled about her middle with a golden girdle of ancient handicraft; her arms were bare from the shoulder; her legs were bare from the knees; her feet were shod with sandals of leather. From the smoothness of her cheeks, from the soft color of her lips, from the slimness of her limbs, from the firm swell of her breasts beneath the fine garment, Simon would have guessed her age to be eighteen or thereabouts. Yet she seemed at once child, girl, and woman, with something boyish, too, in the firmness of her forms, in her balanced carriage, supple as an athlete's, in her air of alert repose.