Nothing new occurs in the third pastoral. But in the fourth, dated three years after the third and seven years after the first poem, matters are considerably altered. The shepherdess has been united to her swain, and the knight finds her rocking a sleeping child in her lap. Time has worked its changes on the knight also, and at first she does not or pretends not to recognise him. To one of his amorous protestations she replies: ‘That is just what Guiraut has told me, and yet I have not been deceived by him.’ ‘Girl,’ he answers, ‘Guiraut has never forgotten you, but you refuse to remember me.’ ‘Sir,’ the girl says, evidently in her old vein of mocking compliance, ‘his graceful bearing pleased me much better than you do, and if he came again I could not resist him.’ In the further course of the conversation Guiraut lays great stress on the fame the girl owes to his songs all over Provence. He also, by a very blunt question, elicits the fact that the father of the child is one ‘who has taken me to church,’ a circumstance which by no means abates the passionate ardour of the troubadour. But he finds the matron as inexorable as he had found the maiden, and at last has to depart on his way with the reluctant compliment: ‘I have tried you sorely, but have found you of unexceptionable conduct.’ Another space of seven years is supposed to elapse before we hear anything more of the shepherdess. These long intervals give a strange touch of realism to the story; for one does not see why the poet should wilfully destroy the illusions of youth and beauty without some reason founded on fact and chronology. This time the shepherdess and her daughter are on their return from a pilgrimage to Compostella. They are resting by the roadside, when the knight riding past sees them, and asks for news from Spain. At first the conversation takes a political turn, quite in accordance with the mature age of the parties, one would think. But the troubadour is incorrigible. He soon relapses into love-making, and goes so far as to threaten the lady with satirical songs in case of non-compliance. Even an appropriate allusion to his grey hair cannot bring him to reason. He listens with an ill grace, and at last takes angry leave.