Simon twisted his features with a whimsical grimace that meant compassion for her madness and mirth at her earnestness. "The gods will be of no use to you in the world beyond this wood. I do not know where they have gone, and in this regard you seem no morsel wiser than I, for all your phrases; but we seem to be both agreed in this, that they have gone, and in my world men raise shrines and altars to unite other powers." "I think I shall still find love honored in the world," the dryad replied, confidently. Simon whistled softly the fag end of a friendly drinking-song before he spoke. He was thinking grimly of what he and others like him honored as love in the world below the wood. "I doubt if you would know the God of Love in some of his changes," he said at last. Then he went on, remembering and correcting: "Yet, as I am told, they hold pretty parliaments of love in Athens where jolly lords and dainty ladies wrangle to infinity over touches and phrases and prove very finical in discrimination." Argathona was not disturbed by his doubts; she sang the same song of Olympian assurance to his unwilling ears. "My lover bears my heart in his body and I bear his in mine. I will follow him to Athens; if needs must, I will follow him to the ends of the earth." Simon tickled at his beard, looking at her with a dismal pity while he strove to light love's candles in the windows of his eyes and to speak to her wooingly, for he still cherished a desperate, dwindling hope for himself in the venture. So he again hazarded discouragement. "You will spare yourself many pains and aches if you stay in the forest. Why can you not listen to me?" Even as he entreated he read in her face that his wooing was vanity, and he ended angrily in a challenge. "I believe you would listen to me if I wore a silk coat and carried a smooth face." The dryad smiled, divinely patient of his peevish speech. "I would not listen to you," she said, "if you wore the robe of Zeus or showed like Apollo." She turned away from him and stretched out her white arms towards the dark wood. "Dear forest, where I have lived so long, the time has come when we must part. Dear birds and beasts, I must say you farewell. For I follow the forest law and I go to seek my mate." Simon looked at her with a new wonder and a new approbation in his eyes. "You are resolved?" he asked, and the girl answered him irrevocably: "I am resolved." "Then," said Simon, "I think I may blow out my lantern," and on the word he swung his lantern to the height of his face and drew back its door. Pursing his lips he whistled a curfew call, and his breath puffed out the feeble light of the candle. "Why do you do that?" Argathona asked, with the naïve curiosity of a child. Simon turned his head to Argathona, and the look on his face was at once roguish and reverential.