“Yea! so do I.” She looked from the cloud-shapes of the western sky to the clear fields of the east and the deeps overhead. Her gaze stayed there a moment, then dropped, a slow sailing bird, to the garden trees below the tower, the late flowers, and the sunburned turf. “The autumn air.... I like that—have always liked it.... In the hurly-burly of this siege, you think yet of the Fair Goal?” “Yes, lady.” “Listen to the convent-bells! That is the Convent of Saint Blandina.... Pierol, down there, has a lute. I am tired. I would rest for an hour and forget blood and crying voices. I would think of fairer things. I would forget Montmaure. Let us go down under the trees, and I will listen to your singing of your Fair Goal.” They descended the tower-stair and came into the garden. Here was a tall cypress and a seat beneath it for the princess, and a lower one for the singer. Pierol gave the lute, then with the dark-eyed girl drew back into the shade of myrtles. Garin touched the strings, but when he sang it was of love itself. The Princess Audiart listened, wrapped in her mantle. When the song was ended, “That is of love itself, and beautiful it was!—Now sing of your own love.” Garin obeyed. When it was done, “That is loveliness!” said the Princess. “This very moment that fair lady has you, doubtless, in her thought.” “She whom I sing, lady, and call the Fair Goal, has never seen me. She knows not that such a man lives.” “What!” exclaimed the princess and turned upon him. “You have seen her once, and she has not seen you at all! You know not her true name nor her home, and she knows not that you are in life! Now, by my faith—” She broke off, sitting staring at him with a strangely vivid face. “I have heard troubadours sing of such loves,” she said slowly, “but I have not believed them. Such loves seemed neither real, nor greatly desirable to be made real. It was to me like other pretences.... But you, Sir Garin of the Golden Island, I hold to be honest—” Garin laid the lute upon the earth beside him. He looked at the trees of the garden, and he seemed to see again a nightingale that flew from shade to shade and sang with a sweetness that ravished. “If I know my own heart,” he said, “it loves with reality!” And as he spoke came the first confusion, strangeness, and doubt, the first sense of something new, or added. It was faint—so underneath that only the palest dawn-light of it came over the horizon of the mind—so far and speechless that Garin knew not what it was, only divined that something was there. Whatever recognition occurred was of something not unpleasing, something that, were it nearer, might be known for wealth. Yet there was an admixture of pain and doubt of himself. He fell silent, faint lines between his brows.