When the wonderful lovers were speaking together, unstained youth and stainless maid, neither of them dreamed that human eyes were watching them from the thicket; but it was so. Simon, twisting and twiddling the myrtle-bough between his big fingers, had picked his way through the forest till the twig began to spin of itself, and then he found the clear fountain and filled his gourd, after satisfying that private thirst of his own which an unmoistened supper of onions had done much to stimulate. He was in no great heat of enthusiasm about the book-reading youth whom the dryad had rescued. He admitted him a brave fellow, but that was nothing; it was no more than a man's business to be brave, and if the wood-girl must like a brave fellow, why could not Simon serve her turn? He grumbled to himself as he went and returned that he believed the minx had sent him to the water-pool on purpose that she might be left alone with the lad; and he reflected cynically, with a cynicism worthy of such a lickerish lantern-bearer, that a woman is a woman though she be a thousand years old and is pleased to call herself immortal. Such an aggrieved, sour humor is apt to grow with much dandling and patting, and Simon was in a simmering bad temper with destiny and the sisters three when he reached the fringe of the glade and saw the youth and the maiden standing together. He paused, unseen, unheeded, on the farther side of darkness, rubbing his bristling chin. They looked to be of very good accord together, and his blood boiled at their amity. "It were a shame to spoil sport," he said to himself, apologetically, for what he was about to do, as he drew back a little deeper into the wood, still unseen and unheard. Then, "it were a shame to lose sport," he added, more truthfully to his itching curiosity, and dropping noiselessly on his hands and knees he proceeded to crawl very quietly towards a part of the wood nearer to the pair from which he might certainly oversee their deeds better, and also possibly overhear their words. He moved quite stealthily and swiftly for his volume of body, for he had learned the primals of forest strategy when he served his apprenticeship to war under Philip the Fair, and his celerity of passage was accompanied by little rustling. At another time, though he did not know this, he could not have hoped to scramble so through the brushwood unperceived by the woodland sense of Argathona, but contact with a mortal sometimes dulls the immortal wit, and Argathona was absorbed by other than woodland thoughts. Indeed, if some faint sound of his patient progress had troubled the night, it would have fallen unheeded on the ears of those two who were wading straight from the shallows into the deeps of love.