The words echoed into Igraine's soul. There was such pain in her great eyes that the girl was startled from the simple contemplation of her own affairs of heart. "You are sad, lady." "Child, I am tired to death." "Bide with me and rest. See, I will feed your horse and give him water; he will do famously under the tree. There is my bed yonder in the corner; I spread a clean sheet on it this very morning. Shall I help you to unarm?" "Thanks, child. How the rain hisses into the pool." "I love the sound, and the soft rattle on the green leaves. All will be fresh and aglister to-morrow, and the flowers will smile, and the trees shake their heads and laugh. How clumsy my fingers are; I am so slow over the buckles; ah! there is the last. I will put the sword and the shield by the bed. Shall we say our prayers?" "You pray, child; I have forgotten how to these many months." VIII There is a charm in simplicity of soul, and in sympathies green in the first rich burgeoning of the mind, unshrivelled and untainted by the miserable misanthropies of the world. The girl Garlotte was as ignorant as you will, but she loved God, had the heart of a thrush in spring-time, and was possessed naturally of a warm and delicate appreciation of the feelings of others that would have put to utter shame the majority of court ladies. Women of a certain gilded class are prone to judge by superficialities. Living often in an artificial air of courtesy, the very life about them is a cultured, perfumed atmosphere unstirred by the deeper wind-throbs of true passion, or the solemn sweep of the more grand emotions. Hypocrisy, veneered with mannerisms, propped with etiquette, pegged up with gold, passes for culture and the badge-royal of fine breeding. Of such things the girl Garlotte was indeed flagrantly ignorant; she had lived in solitudes, and had learnt to comprehend dumb things--the cry of a sheep in pain, the mute look from the eyes of a sick lamb. Her life had made her quick to see, quick to discover. She had all the latent energy of a child, and her senses were the undebauched handmaids of an honest heart. She knew nothing of the trivial prides, the starched and petty arrogances, the small self-satisfactions, that build up the customs of the so-called cultured folk. She thought her thoughts, and they were generous ones, mark you, and spoke out on the instant without fear, as one whose words were in very truth the audible counterpart of the vibrations of her mind.