Stella still had her eyes turned upon things he could not see. He had not been able to make her grasp the fact that she had a stranger at her side.
Each day he brought her another wreath for her burnished tresses—a wreath that he wound with his artist fingers from whatever flowers he could find along his road.
They were becoming scarcer and rarer because of the descending autumn that lay like a hush over the tired world. He made them of pale-tinted crocuses that hung upon her forehead like tired sighs—he bound them with the brightest leaves of the season that resembled the spreading sunsets he so loved at the end of the day. Often he had plucked shining berries that surrounded her waxen brow like heavy drops of blood. And one day the wreath he brought her was all feathery and white, plaited with the fluffy ghosts of the wild clematis that climbs over rock and tree.
On a morning when the clouds hung heavy over their heads he pressed above her lovely face a garland of sloe-berries entwined with grey leaves of the weeping-willow; they fell about her delicate temples, touching her rounded cheeks with loving caresses as a mother's hand would do.
Once as she sat on a hard heap of stones, spent after the tramp of the day, he left her to glean from the barren fields ripe ears of corn that had been scattered by the reapers on their way.
He made them into a golden crown which he laid at her feet in the dust, looking into her eyes, trembling under the weight of his love.
And always he found some lowly plant which he plucked with the thought of bringing a smile to her lips. He even conjured into a circlet of silver the star-shaped thistles that grew amongst the wilting grass, and so that their prickles should not wound her delicate skin, he lined it with soft green moss that lay close against her forehead, guarding it from the slightest scratch.
But the days when he found neither flower nor plant he felt like a beggar that dare not come before the face of his queen....
Often when the roving tribe had pitched their tents for the night, Gundian would go and sit beside the fire with old Zorka the witch, and he never wearied of the tales she told, listening, with interest that was always new, to the quaint words that fell from her lips.
Zorka's heart had made him her own, and she dearly loved to have him at her side; but never did she find the needed courage to urge him to relinquish his quest; yet, as the days rolled by, she feared more and more that the signs might really come true.