But the Lady Wistaria did nothing of the sort. She gathered the flowers tenderly and took them in. Then she came back to the casement, and, leaning far out, gazed with piercing wistfulness out into the little garden below. For some minutes she waited, the patience of her caste fading away gradually into that of the impatience of her sex.
A voice beneath her casement! She leaned farther over. A young man’s eager, glowing face smiled up at her like the rising sun. Again the Lady Wistaria forgot the training of years. Her trembling voice floated down to him:
“Pray you do consider the perils in which you place yourself,” she implored.
“I would pass through all the perils of hell so I might reach you in the end,” he fervidly whispered back.
“Oh, my lord, look yonder! See, the sun is pushing its way upward above the mountains and the hill-tops. Do you not know that soon my uncle’s guards will pass this way?”
“Under the heavens there is nothing in all this wide world worthy as a gift for you, dear lady. That you have deigned to accept my honorable flowers and my abominably constructed poem has given me such strength that I am prepared to fight a whole army of guards. Ay! And to give up readily, too, my life.”
“And if you love me,” she replied, “you will guard with all your strength that life which you are so recklessly exposing to danger.”
“Ah, sweetest lady, can it be true then that you condescend to take some concern in my insignificant existence?”
She made no response other than to pluck from the climbing vine about her casement one little half-blown leaf and drop it at his feet.
As he stooped to pick up the leaf a form interposed itself, and a half-grown man looked him steadily in the face. With a little cry the Lady Wistaria vanished from her casement.