"An elf-arrow?" she asked.
"Don't you know the elf people, Nance? Their dances and their songs?
"'That harp will make the elves of eve
Their dwelling in the moonlight leave,'"
he repeated.
"No," said she, "tell me of the elves."
Upon which he launched into whimsical tales concerning elfin-land and the merry little people of the night and the greenwood. It was a new world which he created for her. To be sure she had been reared on fairy tales—but they were without a semblance of fact. Here were chronicles of a real people as related by their friend. He was authority, for was he himself not an elf-child but a few generations removed?
"Comme extrait que je suis de fée," said Jean François, quoting his brother François Villon.
"Jean François," she said, when they had resumed their way, "did you know I believe that somewhere among my ancestors there must have been a wonderful gipsy woman? I can fancy her a slender, dark-skinned, black-haired girl with wander-longing in her eyes, loving some bully-rook of a young English gentleman, and, without a thought of to-morrow, allowing herself to be carried off to his home, a sort of stolen bride. Then," said she, "I see her later on, when he has settled down to a very respectable ale-drinking, big-paunched squire, eating her heart out for the roads, the camp, and the crimson sky of morning.... What do you think?"
"I think, young woman," said he, with a humorous twitching about his mouth, "that you must be mistaken. In the first place, such a maid as you describe could not be quite so badly fooled in her man.... In the second place, Nance, Charles isn't really half so stupid as you are making him out to be."
"O!" she exclaimed in hurt surprise.