"While you were gone this afternoon," she said, "and I was lying here, eyes wide open, seeming to feel the bed sway like the ship, I fell to counting the ticking of the stair-clock below, and thinking how each second was recording the eternity of my love for you. And as I lay a-listening and thinking, came one by the window singing 'John O'Bail', and I heard voices in the tap-room and the clatter of pewter flagons. On a settle outside the tap-room window, full in the sun, sat the songster and his companions, drinking new ale and singing 'John O'Bail'—a song I never chanced to hear before, and I shall not soon forget it for lack of schooling"—and she sang softly, sitting there, clasping her knees, and swaying with the quaint rhythm:
"'Where do you wend your way, John O'Bail,
Where do you wend your way?'
'I follow the spotted trail
Till a maiden bids me stay,'
'Beware of the trail, John O'Bail,
Beware of the trail, I say!'
"Thus it runs, Carus, the legend of this John O'Bail, how he sought the wilderness, shunning his kind, and traveled and trapped and slew the deer, until one day at sunrise a maid of the People of the Morning hailed him, bidding him stay:
"'Turn to the fire of dawn, John O'Bail,
Turn to the fire of dawn;