‘Well, you are here--and like Chloris in a green kirtle. I love you in it.’ ‘Alack! and when it is wore out you will love me no more.’ ‘Then it shall last you a lifetime.’ ‘God advise me, if I am to choose between that and your love. But my comfort is after a year or two you would learn to hate me in it.’ ‘To hate you, Joan! You can find comfort in that?’ ‘Nay, comfort in a new gown. Yet it glads me that it likes you, dear my lord. I will wear green to my wedding and green till my bedding under the green turf. It was to make myself inconspicious against the green grass that I put it on. Yet there is no grass in here, Brion.’ ‘No, by my faith. You speak “conspiciously” well. We are not so deep in but we may be seen. How merry you are.’ ‘Am I? Mayhap it is to hide something.’ ‘What! Are you growing afraid?’ ‘Afraid? By my troth, no. If you could hear my conscience singing! It is a carol all quavers.’ ‘Come, then, while I show you.’ He put an arm unresisted, about her, and they turned to the dark essay. ‘’Tis by here, the way,’ he whispered--‘the only one for secrecy. But I doubt you will dare it when you see.’ She leaned close to him, not answering. For all her professed assurance, the influence of the place was beginning to tell upon her a little. As they pushed deeper into the thicket, the light saddened and grew obscure, and an intense silence gathered about them; the snaky branches seemed to writhe, involving their path in noiseless folds, and a smell of poisonous water came to their nostrils. ‘It is a horrible place,’ whispered the girl suddenly; and she stopped. ‘You are frightened, Joan. We will go back.’ ‘No. Give me one moment. Look, is that the moat, and the body of a great serpent stretching across it?’ ‘It is the moat; but the serpent is only a limb of that big tree before us, sleek and mottled like a green worm. It bridges the ditch and rests upon the wall beyond; and it is over that we must go, if go we must.’ ‘How did you discover it, Brion--this way, I mean?’ ‘Why, I came to look. I had promised you I would contrive a plan; and here was my contrivance, all ready provided for us. I take no credit for it.’ ‘Nay, but you shall have it, since it was credit enough to seek into these glooms you feared. And you dared it just for my idle word, Brion?’ ‘I should be no true knight, Joan, if I refused to descend into the very pit for my lady’s sake.’ He looked, smiling, down on her, and she up at him. Some sense of an indefinable pressure, of a helpless entreaty caught at his heart with a shock. And the next moment he had bent his head lower, and kissed her lips. The instant he had done so, the awful rapture of that profanation smote him scarlet. He thought he must have alienated her beyond forgiveness. ‘O, Joan!’ he said--‘I was mad.’