Gyll drew back in amaze. “How now, goblin,” she asked, with not a little terror; “art gone wholly mad?”
He said nothing, but slowly his expression altered until a mingling of grief and cold repulsion told her of his inward change. “I would have risked a wedding,” he said, at last, and drawing the bear to his side. “I would have made you honest wife, and not ungladly, for I felt a kind o’ love—ah, a deal o’ love—for you, Gyll; but I’m a peculiar personage, and not irreverent to men o’ God and church-like things, be I rake or no. Faith, ye’re a most heartless jade, who’ll ne’er be wife o’ mine. Ye’ve shown yourself. For that I thank thee;” whereat he turned on his heel and, leading away King Lud, disappeared in the forest.
For a moment Gyll stood listening, and once she called, but only the clank, clank of the bear’s chain, growing fainter and more faint in the distance, answered her unhappy cry. Finally, when the sound had died, a flood of tears fell from her eyes, but quickly she brushed them away, then, turning, walked in the direction of the shore, and forced from her tremulous lips a song, popular at the time in Southwark:
“Be merry, friends, and take no thought;
For worldly cares now care ye naught,
For whoso doth, when all is fought,
Shall find that thought availeth not—
Be merry, friends.”
Her voice sounded low, its lilt for once seeming artificial. The friends she strove to cheer were her own thoughts—new, discomforting thoughts—yet perhaps more truly friends than all their predecessors. She persisted, however, in drowning the inward mutter of their realization with her voice’s melody: