On the eighth morning, as she paced the garden walks, a lizard scampered from her path, and she chased it as a five year old child might have done. A slim cypress tree stood in her way; she grasped it in her arms, and held it, laying her cheek against it as if it were a friend. Some new sense was dawning in her of kinship with branch and flower. She was forgetting how to think; she was Daphne, the Greek maiden, whose life was half the life of a tree.
When she took her arms from the tree she saw that he was there, looking at her from over the hedge, with the golden brown lights in eyes and hair, and the smile that had no touch of amusement in it, only of happiness.
"Sometimes," he murmured, "you remind me of Hebe, but on the whole, I think you are more like my sister Diana."
"Tell me about Diana," begged Daphne, coming near the hedge and putting one hand on the close green leaves.
"We were great friends as children," observed Apollo. "It was I who taught her how to hunt, and we used to chase each other in the woods. When I went faster then she did, she used to get angry and say she would not play. Oh, those were glorious mornings, when the light was clear at dawn!"
"Why are you here?" asked Daphne abruptly, "and, if you will excuse me, where did you come from?"
"Surely you have heard about the gods being exiled from Greece! We wander, for the world has cast us out. Some day they will need us again, and will pluck the grass from our shrines, and then we shall come back to teach them."
"Teach them what?" asked the girl. She could make out nothing from the mystery of that face, and besides, she did not dare to look too closely.
"I should teach them joy," he answered simply.
They were so silent, looking at each other over the dark green hedge, that the lizards crept back in the sunshine close to their feet. Daphne's blue gown and smooth dark hair were outlined against the deep green of her cypress tree. A grapevine that had grown about the tree threw the shadow of delicate leaf and curling tendril on her pale cheek and scarlet lips. The expression of the heathen god as he looked at her denoted entire satisfaction.