Pelleas rose up and did her bidding. The green boughs were ready to his great sword, as it gleamed and glimmered in the wizard light. He cut two forked stakes, and set them upright in the ground, with a pole between them. Then he built up branches about this centrepiece till the whole was roofed and walled with shelving green; he spread his red cloak therein for a carpet. Igraine sat and watched his labour. Life seemed to have rushed nearly to its zenith, and her thoughts were soaring in regions of gold.
The black moth night had come into the sky with his golden-spotted wings all spread. It was time for idyllic love, pure looks, and the touch of hands. The billowy bosoms of the trees rolled sombrously above, and the little pool was like a wizard’s glass, black and deep with sheeny mysteries.
Igraine beckoned Pelleas to a seat on the grass bank at her feet when he had finished. There was a light on her face that the man had not seen before, a kind of quiet rapture, a veil of exultation, as though her maidenhood were flowering gold under a net of pinkest satin. She had loosened her hair in straight streams upon her shoulders, and her habit lay open to the very base of her shapely throat. She sat there and looked at him, with hands clasped in her lap, and her grey gown rising and falling markedly as she breathed. It seemed to Pelleas that there was nothing in the whole universe save twilight, two eyes, a stirring bosom, and two wistful lips.
They had been speaking of their ride, and of the many strange things that had befallen them during their adventures together. Igraine had waxed strangely tender in her talk, and had spoken subtle bodeful words that meant much at such a season. She was flinging bonds about Pelleas that made him exult and suffer. His heart seemed great within him and ready to break, for the blood that bubbled and yearned in it in glorious anguish.
“To-morrow,” said the girl, “we enter Winchester, and I have known you, Pelleas, two weeks and some few hours more. You seem to have been in my life many years.”
Words flooded into Pelleas’s heart, and stifled all struggle for a moment. He was breathing like a hunted thing.
“Igraine,” he said.
“Pelleas.”
“I never lived till our lives were joined.”
Igraine gave a little gasp, and bent over him suddenly, her eyes aglow, her hair falling down into his face.