The poet smiled. “Sorrow is the secret of happiness, little White Doe; and some day, when you have lived perhaps a million years up near the sun and are entirely happy, you will say, ‘’Tis all because I guessed the secret far down there.’”
She looked up at him, her eyes sparkling with pleasure. “Tell me now,” she pleaded; but seeing that he had already forgotten, she turned and, with a pout, ran off to seek her dusky playfellow. “Dark boy,” she said, on finding him near by, “I am glad you do not know the secrets I don’t know.”
For a moment Eleanor watched her as here and there in the distance she flitted about the bronze figure.
“I can in no way comprehend her, Master Marlowe.”
“Nay, nor shall the day come in all the earthly future when she shall understand herself. Thus are some of us prescient with meaning, yet forever enigmatical, save to—save to—shall I say God?”
“Yes, to God,” replied Eleanor, simply; and, rising, she walked with Marlowe into the fields beyond the town.
For several minutes they went on in silence, she in wonder waiting to hear what he would say, he melancholy and wrapped in meditation. At last they came to the edge of a wide wheat-field, over which the surface of the sunlit grain swayed and rippled like a lake of pale and molten gold. As the poet looked across it he smiled sadly, yet with a certain light recklessness of manner that belied the former seriousness of his look. “See,” he said, “the wheat inclines eastward; the wind is from the west. I’d have thee remember, Mistress Dare, that if in the near future I am no more to be seen, there is no deeper reason in’t than in this course the wind doth follow. To America I came, for the wind blew hither from the east. The wind is changed, madam, and so my way. ’Tis Fate ordains this brief farewell.”
At these words Eleanor started perceptibly, her eyes opening wide in amazement. “Farewell!” she exclaimed. “O sir, what mean you by ‘farewell’?”
He took her hand and, bending low, kissed it reverently. “I cannot say, for, alas! many know the present meaning, but none the hidden prophecy, of that word ‘farewell.’”