“You knew,” she said seriously, looking back across her shoulder at Archibald, “that it’s the Well at the World’s End?”
“I guessed it,” he said as seriously.
“And whoso drinks the nine drops shall win his heart’s desire,
At the Well o’ the World’s End,”
she quoted softly. Then she leaned toward him, laughing, and touched his lips nine times with the cool wet forefinger of a dripping hand.
For one reckless moment, he was tempted to seize the daring hand, to hold it fast and kiss it, from pink finger tips to blue veined wrist. With any other woman he had ever known he would have dared it, with any other woman the thing would have been a challenge—but he looked into the laughing face so near him, and buried his hands in the moss beside him.
She was different. It was too much to risk—this blessed comradeship. He did not dare.
“Shall win his heart’s desire,” he echoed. “And if he does not know the desire of his heart?”
“One day he will learn it and then he will be glad of the nine drops from the Well o’ the World’s End.”
Archibald closed his eyes and lay quiet, but there was tumult in his thoughts. In May he had been so sure that he knew the face of his heart’s desire, had been mad with the beauty of it, hungered and thirsted for it, broken heart and spirit in pursuit of it In May!—Now, in July, he could feel the cool touch of the nine drops from the Well o’ the World’s End without any stirring of the old longing, any throb of the old pain. The fever had died quite out of him and the face that looked at him from that faraway Maytime, was beautiful—but not the face of his heart’s desire.