So she spoke and was silent, and the night wind fluttered the fair curls upon her nape and the silver gray folds about her knees. Then the effulgent, the sun-god, moved from his fellows, Phœbus Apollo, with his lyre cradled in his left arm, and his right hand touched the strings, and what he spoke he seemed to sing, and his song was as the song of the wandering stars in heaven. And he spoke to Argathona, and said: "Daughter of the gods, the gods forbid your unfaith. To be of us once is to be of us forever, and, though we linger in the hollow land, we are still the celestials, and still we desire the remembrance and the fidelity of our kin. It is nobler to hold to our memory than to surrender us for a mortal and a mortal's melancholy god. Wait in the greenwood, watch with the ancient faith, patient in the knowledge of endless youth." So he was silent, and the sunlight of his words seemed to race all over her body and thread her veins with fire. And thereafter it seemed to Argathona, in her slumber, that god spoke after god innumerable, beautiful gods and grotesque gods in their attributes of benignant or terrible divinity, each appealing to her, or commanding her to stay with the ancient faith, and to shut her heart against the sons of men and the Son of Man. Their voices were eloquent as the rustling of leaves in the forest or the crisping of waves on the shore, so that she could have been content to rest there and to listen to them in gladness through the revolving years. When it seemed to her that all had spoken, came from that fair company the fairest of them all, Aphrodite, the incomparable, lovelier than all women, loveliest of all goddesses, with her gray doves fluttering about her naked body, and as she moved across the grass red roses burgeoned at her feet. Aphrodite came very nigh to the sleeping dryad, and her eyes were shining with the passion and compassion of love, and her voice was wooing and winning with a music unheard out of dreams. Aphrodite spoke, and said: "Argathona, I pity you, and I know not what to say, for I, like you, have known what it is to love a mortal, and in very truth I think it were better to love a mortal than never to know the meaning of love. Love, then, this mortal and let him die divinely, having kissed immortal lips and clasped immortal beauty. And when he is but as the dust of yesterday, there will still be comely mortals to love, and you can quench your passing hours of sorrow with golden years of joy. But do not forsake the old faith for the new god, for he that is by my side is still the greatest god in the world, and ever the master of mortal men."