The lady shrugged her shoulders and laughed a little.
"But they do not carve that way," she protested. "It is not sculpture. Thou wouldst fill the land with frozen creatures—ai!" with another little shrug. "It would be haunted and spectral. Nay, give me the old forms. They are best."
Kenkenes fairly gasped with his sudden descent from earnest hope to disappointment. A flood of half-angry shame dyed his face and the wound to his sensibilities showed its effect so plainly that the beauty noted it with a sudden burst of compunction.
"Of a truth," she added, her voice grown wondrous soft, "I am full of sympathy for thee, Kenkenes. Nay, look up. I can not be happy if thou art not."
"That suffices. I am cheered," he began, but the note of sarcasm in his voice was too apparent for him to permit himself to proceed. He caught up the lyre, and drawing up a diphros—a double seat of fine woods—rested against it and began to improvise with an assumption of carelessness. Ta-meri sank back in her chair and regarded him from under dreamy lids—her senses charmed, her light heart won by his comeliness and talent. Kenkenes became conscious of her inspection, at last, and looked up at her. His eyes were still bright with his recent feeling and the hue in his cheeks a little deeper. The admiration in her face became so speaking that he smiled and ran without pausing into one of the love-lyrics of the day. Breaking off in its midst, he dropped the lyre and said with honest apology in his voice:
"I crave thy pardon, Ta-meri. What right had I to weight thee with my cares! It was selfish, and yet—thou art so inviting a confidante, that it is not wholly my fault if I come to seek of thee, my oldest and sweetest friend, the woman comfort that was bereft me with my rightful comforter."
"Neither mother nor sister nor lady-love," she mused. He nodded, but the slight interrogative emphasis caught him, and he looked up at her. He nodded again.
"Nay, nor lady-love, thanks to the luck of Nechutes."
"Nechutes is no longer lucky," she said deliberately.
"No matter," Kenkenes insisted. "I shall be gone eighteen days, and his luck will have changed before I can return."