Her house lay two leagues from mine. It was a low-built mansion lying in a concave park. The thatch was gaudy with stonecrop and lichen. Amongst the central chimneys a foreign bird sat on a nest of twigs. The long windows blazed with heraldic devices; and paintings of kings and queens and nobles hung in the dim chambers. Here she dwelt with a retinue of aged servants, fantastic women and men half imbecile, who salaamed before her with eastern humility and yet addressed her in such terms as gossips use. Had she given them life they could not have obeyed with more reverence. Quaint things the women wrought for her--pomanders and cushions of thistledown; and the men were never happier than when they could tell her of the first thrush’s egg in the thornbush or the sege of bitterns that haunted the marsh. She was their goddess and their daughter. Each day had its own routine. In the morning she rode and sang and played; at noon she read in the dusty library, drinking to the full of the dramatists and the platonists. Her own life was such a tragedy as an Elizabethan would have adored. None save her people knew her history, but there were wonderful stories of how she had bowed to tradition, and concentrated in herself the characteristics of a thousand wizard fathers. In the blossom of her youth she had sought strange knowledge, and had tasted thereof, and rued. The morning after my declaration she rode across her park to the meditating walk I always paced till noon. She was alone, dressed in a habit of white lutestring with a loose girdle of blue. As her mare reached the yew hedge, she dismounted, and came to me with more lightness than I had ever beheld in her. At her waist hung a black glass mirror, and her half-bare arms were adorned with cabalistic jewels. When I knelt to kiss her hand, she sighed heavily. ‘Ask me nothing,’ she said. ‘Life itself is too joyless to be more embittered by explanations. Let all rest between us as now. I will love coldly, you warmly, with no nearer approaching.’ Her voice rang full of a wistful expectancy: as if she knew that I should combat her half-explained decision. She read me well, for almost ere she had done I cried out loudly against it:--‘It can never be so--I cannot breathe--I shall die?’ She sank to the low moss-covered wall. ‘Must the sacrifice be made?’ she asked, half to herself. ‘Must I tell him all?’ Silence prevailed a while, then turning away her face she said: ‘From the first I loved you, but last night in the darkness, when I could not sleep for thinking of your words, love sprang into desire.’ I was forbidden to speak. ‘And desire seemed to burst the cords that bound me. In that moment’s strength I felt that I could give all for the joy of being once utterly yours.’ I longed to clasp her to my heart. But her eyes were stern, and a frown crossed her brow.