“Jealous?” Dearwyn dropped her flowers to clap her hands softly. “Tata, I have guessed his distemper rightly. Let no one say that I am not a witch for cleverness! Ah, you can have the best fun that ever any maid could have! If you could but make him believe something about that Danishman that Teboen saw last winter!” “Last winter?” Randalin repeated. “Oh! I had altogether forgotten him. It seems that it has not been truthfully spoken when—” The little Angle smothered the rest in her rapturous embrace. “The ring, Tata,—that would be the cream of all! Let him think that Rothgar gave it to you, that he is your lover! I would give many kirtles to see his face.” “Rothgar?” Randalin’s voice was light with scorn. “As likely would! be to think him love-struck for the serving-wench who sparkled her eyes at him, as he to think that Rothgar Lodbroksson could count for aught with me! Yet I say nothing against the fun it would be. It may be that if he take notice of the thing and question me—just to see how he would look—” She broke off discreetly, but the one elf which the Abbot had not exorcised crept out and danced in the dimple of her cheek. Dearwyn shook her floral rod with an assumption of severity. “I trust he will be sorely disquieted,” she said. “He deserves no otherwise for his behavior last winter. Are you so soft of heart, Tata, that you are never going to reckon with him for that?” The dimple-elf took wing and all the mischief in the girl’s eyes seemed to go with him. “Those days are buried,” she said. “Let the earth grow green above them.” And suddenly she leaned forward and hid her face on the other’s shoulder. “Bring them not before me, Dearwyn, my friend, until I am a little surer of my happiness. It is so new yet, Dearwyn, so new! And it came to me so suddenly that sometimes it almost seems as if it might depart as suddenly from me.” A while they nestled together without speaking, the little maid’s cheek resting lovingly on her friend’s dark hair. It was a page thrusting aside the arras that broke the spell. Opening his mouth to make a flourishing announcement, the words were checked on his tongue by four white hands motioning stern commands for silence. “It is the King’s Marshal,” he framed with protesting lips. But even that failed to gain him admittance. Rising, flushed and smiling, the girl with the blue lilies in her hair tiptoed toward him. “I have orders to receive the Marshal,” she whispered. “Where is he?” “He is in the Old Room,” the page answered rather resentfully, but resigned himself as he remembered that, however this curtailed his importance, it left open a prompter return to his game of leap-frog along the passage.