"That's beautiful," Honoria went on. "I stopped Mendarva, the other day, and he told me wonders about you. He says he tried you with a hard-boiled egg and you swung the hammer and chipped the shell all round without bruising the white a bit. Is that true?"
Taffy nodded.
"And your learning—the Latin and Greek, I mean; do you still go on with it?"
He nodded again, toward a volume of Euripides that lay open on the work-bench.
"And the stories you used to tell George and me; do you go on telling them to yourself?"
He was obliged to confess that he never did. She sat for awhile watching the sparks as they flew. Then she said, "I should like to hear you tell one again. That one about Aslog and Orm, who ran away by night across the ice-fields and took a boat and came to an island with a house on it, and found a table spread and the fire lit, but no inhabitants anywhere—You remember? It began 'Once upon a time, not far from the city of Drontheim, there lived a rich man——'"
Taffy considered a moment and began "Once upon a time, not far from the city of Drontheim——" He paused, eyed the horse-shoe cooling between the pincers, and shook his head. It was no use. Apollo had been too long in service with Admetus, and the tale would not come.
"At any rate," Honoria persisted, "you can tell me something out of your books: something you have just been reading."
So he began to tell her the story of Ion, and managed well enough in describing the boy and how he ministered before the shrine at Delphi, sweeping the temple and scaring the birds away from the precincts; but when he came to the plot of the play and, looking up, caught Honoria's eyes, it suddenly occurred to him that all the rest of the story was a sensual one and he could not tell it to her. He blushed, faltered, and finally broke down.
"But it was beautiful," said she, "so far as it went; and it's just what I wanted. I shall remember that boy Ion now, whenever I think of you helping your father in the church at home. If the rest of the story is not nice, I don't want to hear it."