and burst into a sudden passion of tears.  There were born every day, she reflected, such hosts of women-children, who were not princesses, and therefore compelled to marry detestable kings.

Dawn found her in the orchard.  She was to remember that it was a cloudy morning, and that mist-tatters trailed from the more distant trees.  In the slaty twilight the garden’s verdure was lustreless, the grass and foliage were uniformly sombre save where dewdrops showed like beryls.  Nowhere in the orchard was there absolute shadow, nowhere a vista unblurred; in the east, half-way between horizon and zenith, two belts of coppery light flared against the gray sky like embers swaddled by ashes.  The birds were waking; there were occasional scurryings in tree-tops and outbursts of peevish twittering to attest as much; and presently came a singing, less musical than that of many a bird perhaps, but far more grateful to the girl who heard it, heart in mouth.  A lute accompanied the song demurely.

Sang Alain: 

  “O Madam Destiny, omnipotent,
  Be not too obdurate to us who pray
  That this our transient grant of youth be spent
  In laughter as befits a holiday,
  From which the evening summons us away,
  From which to-morrow wakens us to strife
  And toil and grief and wisdom,—­and to-day
  Grudge us not life!

  “O Madam Destiny, omnipotent,
  Why need our elders trouble us at play? 
  We know that very soon we shall repent
  The idle follies of our holiday,
  And being old, shall be as wise as they: 
  But now we are not wise, and lute and fife
  Plead sweetlier than axioms,—­so to-day
  Grudge us not life!

  “O Madam Destiny, omnipotent,
  You have given us youth—­and must we cast away
  The cup undrained and our one coin unspent
  Because our elders’ beards and hearts are gray? 
  They have forgotten that if we delay
  Death claps us on the shoulder, and with knife
  Or cord or fever flouts the prayer we pray—­
  ‘Grudge us not life!’

  “Madam, recall that in the sun we play
  But for an hour, then have the worm for wife,
  The tomb for habitation—­and to-day
  Grudge us not life!”

Candor in these matters is best.  Katharine scrambled into the crotch of the apple-tree.  The dew pattered sharply about her, but the Princess was not in a mood to appraise discomfort.

“You came!” this harper said, transfigured; and then again, “You came!”

She breathed, “Yes.”

So for a long time they stood looking at each other.  She found adoration in his eyes and quailed before it; and in the man’s mind not a grimy and mean incident of the past but marshalled to leer at his unworthiness:  yet in that primitive garden the first man and woman, meeting, knew no sweeter terror.