“It was a mist, monsieur, out of which a face grew like a sweet-briar blossom—a face, and then all down to her pink feet that trod the wind-flowers of the wood. Within her hair were little nests of light, glowing green and violet, that came and went, or broke and were shattered into a rain of golden strands. They were the tears she had shed beneath the cross. She wore the wounds, a five-pointed star, upon her breast, and I saw the rising and falling of her heart as it were the glowing of fire behind wood ashes. All about her, and about me, was a low thick murmur of voices that I could not understand. But sometimes I thought I saw the brown fearful eyes of the little people look from under the hanging fronds of fern, imploring to put their lips to the white buds of her feet. Then her eyes gathered me to their embrace; and I sailed on a blue sea, and was taken into the arms of the wind and kissed so that I seemed to swoon.”
She paused, breathing softly.
“Truly,” said Ned: “this was the very pagan Queen of Love.”
“She is the Queen of Love, monsieur, else had my eyes never been opened to see the little folk of the greenwoods. For to be Queen of Love is to be Queen of Nature, and both titles hath she from le Bon Dieu.”
Suddenly the girl edged a little nearer her companion, looked up in his face appealingly, and put her clasped hands upon his knee as he sat.
“God made Nature, monsieur,” she whispered. “God is Love. Oh, I read in the sweet eyes many things that were strange to my traditions!—even that human side of the Mother, that monsieur has sought to disclose. God is Love, and He hath given us passion, not forbidding us passion’s cure.”
Ned’s brows took a startled frown, and he made as if to rise. Nicette stole her hand quickly to his.
“Monsieur, it cannot be wrong to love—it cannot be that He would lend Himself as a subtle lure to the very sin His code denounces. It is the code—it is the Church that has misconstrued Him.”
Something in the young man’s face gave her pause in the midst of her panting eagerness. She drew back immediately, with a little artificial laugh.
“La Sainte Marie was all in white,” she said, “with a blue cloak the colour of the skies. And what is the fashion with the fine ladies in London, monsieur?”