Their footsteps ceased upon the garden path. The moonlight flung their stilly shadows to the tattered roses. On the pediment of Love's plaster Temple one fairy light still palely glimmered in the vast white splendour of chaste Artemis. A nightingale trilled once, then fell a-dreaming. And through the boy's learned soul passed murmurs of ages far estranged, which yet blended together and took on a nature of their own--a clear dim note of the Athenian lyre, hinting beneath all artificial chords the melody of the earth and of truth, a gavotte by Lully or Rameau, a laugh of Heine, or songs they sang at the Cremorne Gardens, twenty years ago. He felt the moonlit sky, the ruined bowers, the Temple and the roses dwindle and shapen into the scenery of a stage--as though the girl in travesty before him had made a mockery of all the linked worlds. Then suddenly he knew. "Columbine," he said, "you will not leave me thus?" She stepped away from him lightly, arms akimbo. "And what are you to me, Pierrot?" she cried; "or Columbine to you?" "To me," he answered, "you are the colour of the soul of the marble statues, and the shape of the movement of the gliding moon." "Like her," she laughed, "I shine falsely and I shine pale. Like her, to you I am only a shape that is no shape and a colour that is no colour." "I will chase you from shape to shape," replied the young King. "I will pursue you from hue to hue; though you change to a slim gazelle or silver fish or a little seed of corn. And when I have conquered you at last, and held you, and driven you to your true and pristine form, then victorious, as now vanquished, will I swear eternal passion at your feet." And he knelt on one knee before her. "Why, Pierrot!" she whispered, "you said you would not love me yet!" "But that," he replied, "was three hours ago." "Pursue me no more, Pierrot," she warned him. "The moon has tricked your eye: the scents of the garden have deceived your heart. Am I not still Arnolfo? am I not still a boy?" "Columbine," he replied, "I am pleading for love. Answer me now, tell me my doom, torment me no longer, for I hear approaching the fiery wheels of your departure." "Oh, what a thirst for words you have," sighed she. "Stay there on your knees in silence, impatient, importunate Pierrot, and wait till I choose to answer." "They have come to take you away!" he cried. "Your dragon is roaring at the gate. Your answer, Columbine!" "Oh, stay there kneeling as I bid you," she cried, "and forget your thirst for words. Was it your mother, boy, who gave you eyes that colour in the night? Stay there and do not speak or raise your glance till you hear my dragon rolling me away--and let me give you, in my own fashion, the silent answer of my farewell."