Argathona seemed to be listening to Simon, but in truth she was paying little heed to his surly speech. She was looking steadfastly at the white ribbon of road which skirted the glade and ran, a highway, to Athens, and her face showed only the composure of a noble hope. "He does not love her," she murmured to herself, and her words flowed with the motion of some proud and ancient song. "It is I whom he loves, I who love him." Simon hoisted his shoulders to his ears. These amatory flights were not to his mind, for he took himself to be in a free field, and he was mulishly set to push his own case. "He may live content enough with his bargain," he asserted. "Lady Esclaramonde of Thebes is a great lady and a wealthy and a fair, with broad lands for her dower--a better match, saving your presence, for young Athens than a wood-wench in a wood." Argathona looked at him now with the same air of triumphant patience. "You do not understand us," she said. "If it were for his welfare to leave me I would not hinder him. If it made for his happiness, now and hereafter, to dwell with this woman I would not hurt his life. But I have looked into his eyes and I know that he loves me as I love him." Simon resented sharply this harping on a single string. The Athenian prince was not the only man in the world, nor the only man in Greece. There was a stout fellow at that moment, hailing lately from Corinth and earlier from Rouen, well worthy of any maid's eye. "Be wise," he counselled, jovially, slapping his broad chest. "The boy has gone and there is an end of the adventure. Let by-gones be by-gones, and look more favorably upon one whom war and the world have mellowed to a ripe prime. A green goose makes a sour sweetheart. Here is a trained hawk to your hand. I will abide with you in the woodland cheerfully if you give me the wink of a lid." Simon felt that he was acting most handsomely, and he beamed. But Argathona surveyed him with very much that show of scorn which an armed and haughty amazon might have vouchsafed to some woosome, presuming satyr who dared to waylay her on a hunting morning. "I am glad the world you serve is not all made up of men like you," she said, quietly, and then she turned her calm eyes again upon the white highway. Simon laughed dryly, but he felt that he grinned on the wrong side of his visage, for it vexed him sorely to find the maid so stubborn. "Alack the day, no," he answered, gruffly. "Believe me, pretty mistress, I show better than the bulk. I am but quarter bad, like a clipped coin, and such as I am it is no offence for me to cherish you." Argathona answered him more gently. "You are well enough when you do not fret me with foolish words. But you do not speak of a cheerful world." Simon was perplexed. "What a saint's name does it matter to you how the world is compassed?" Argathona understood the drift of his question. "I am going into the world," she said, with decision.