“The hounds took us three miles beyond Carwithiel:  and there, just as they lost, Aide-de-camp cast his off-hind shoe.  I didn’t find it out at first, and now I’ve had to walk him all the way back.  Are you alone here?”

“Yes.”

“Who was that I saw leaving as I came up?”

“You saw someone?”

“Yes.”  She nodded, looking him straight in the face.  “It looked like a woman.  Who was she?”

“That was Lizzie Pezzack, the girl who sold you her doll, once.  She’s a servant down at the farm where I lodge.”

Honoria said no more for the moment, but seated herself on the Dane’s anvil, while Taffy chose a bar of iron and stepped out to examine Aide-de-camp’s hoof.  He returned and in silence began to blow up the fire.

“I dare say you were astonished to see me,” she remarked at length.

“Yes.”

“I’m still forbidden to speak to you.  The last time I did it, grandfather beat me.”

“The old brute!” Taffy nipped the hot iron savagely in his pincers.

“I wonder if he’ll do it again.  Somehow I don’t think he will.”

Taffy looked at her.  She had drawn herself up, and was smiling.  In her close-fitting habit she seemed very slight, yet tall, and a woman grown.  He took the bar to the anvil and began to beat it flat.  His teeth were shut, and with every blow he said to himself “Brute!”

“That’s beautiful,” Honoria went on.  “I stopped Mendarva the other day, and he told me wonders about you.  He says he tried you with a hard-boiled egg, and you swung the hammer and chipped the shell all round without bruising the white a bit.  Is that true?”

Taffy nodded.

“And your learning—­the Latin and Greek, I mean; do you still go on with it?”

He nodded again, towards a volume of Euripides that lay open on the workbench.

“And the stories you used to tell George and me; do you go on telling them to yourself?”

He was obliged to confess that he never did.  She sat for a while watching the sparks as they flew.  Then she said, “I should like to hear you tell one again.  That one about Aslog and Orm, who ran away by night across the ice-fields and took a boat and came to an island with a house on it, and found a table spread and the fire lit, but no inhabitants anywhere—­You remember?  It began ’Once upon a time, not far from the city of Drontheim, there lived a rich man—­’”

Taffy considered a moment and began “Once upon a time, not far from the city of Drontheim—­” He paused, eyed the horse-shoe cooling between the pincers, and shook his head.  It was no use.  Apollo had been too long in service with Admetus, and the tale would not come.

“At any rate,” Honoria persisted, “you can tell me something out of your books:  something you have just been reading.”

So he began to tell her the story of Ion, and managed well enough in describing the boy and how he ministered before the shrine at Delphi, sweeping the temple and scaring the birds away from the precincts:  but when he came to the plot of the play and, looking up, caught Honoria’s eyes, it suddenly occurred to him that all the rest of the story was a sensual one, and he could not tell it to her.  He blushed, faltered, and finally broke down.