When Igraine had ended her tears, and grown calm and quiet, Pelleas took her hand and led her to a grass bank painted thick with flowers that sloped to the white boughs of a great May tree. He was radiant in his manhood, and his eyes burnt for her with such a splendour of pride and tenderness that she trembled in thought for the secret she had kept from him in her heart. He could know nothing of Gorlois, or he would not have come thus to her. The mocking face of fate leered at her like a satyr out of the shadows, yet with the joy of the moment she put the thoughts aside and lived on the man's lips and the great love that brimmed for her in his eyes. Pelleas sat in the long grass at her feet and looked up at her as at a saint. Never had she seen such glory of happiness on human face, never such manhood deified by the holier instincts of the heart. The sheer strength of his devotion carried her above her cares and made her content to live for the present, and to gird time with the girdle of an hour. "You are no nun, Igraine?" She smiled at him and shook her head. "No, no, Pelleas." "Would to God you had told me that a year ago." "Would to God I had." "It would have saved much woe." Igraine hung her head. The man's words were prophetic in their honest ignorance, and the whole tale had almost rushed from her that moment but for a certain selfishness that held her mute, a fear that overpowered her. She knew the fibre of Pelleas's soul. To tell him the truth would mean to call his honour to arms against his love, and she dreaded that thought as she dreaded death. "I was a fool, Pelleas," she said, with a queer intensity of tone that made the man look quickly into her eyes. "You did not know." "Pardon, Pelleas, I knew your soul, how true and strong it was. God knows I tried you to the end, and bitter truth it proved to me. If you had only waited." "Ah, Igraine." "Only a night; you would have had the truth at dawn." "I struggled for your soul and for mine, as I thought." "Yes, yes, you chose the nobler part, thinking me a mere woman, a frail thing blown about by my own passion. I loved you, Pelleas, for the deed, though it nigh brought me to my death." "God knows I honoured you, Igraine." "Too well; it had been better for us both if you had been more human." There was an anguish of regret in her voice, a plaintive accusation that made Pelleas wince to the core. He bent down and kissed her hand as it lay in her lap, then looked into her face with a mute appeal that brought her to the verge of tears. "Courage, courage, dear heart." "God bless you, Igraine." "I am very glad of your love." "Come now, tell me how the year has passed." Igraine held his hand in hers and began to twist her hair about his wrist into a bracelet of gold. Her eyes faltered from his, and were hot and heavy with an inward misery of thought. The man's words wounded her at every turn, and in his innocence he shook her happiness as a wind shakes a tree.