For we have long had a dream—we are too frequently besieged by the ways of the world to call it a hope—that sometime They will come and take us, the Wind or the Day or any of the things that we love, and thus save us this dreary business of dying.
We skirted the edge of the wood, looking down the while at that place of light. Within, figures were moving, there was the faint music of strings, and now and then we heard laughter. To complete our mystification, as we were well in line with the white portals there issued from the depth of green and white a group of women, fair women in white gowns and with unbound hair—and they stepped to the grass-plot before the door and moved at the direction of one who leaned, watching, in the white portico. At that we hesitated no longer but advanced boldly across the moonlit green. And when I saw that the figure in the portico wore a frock of pink and when I saw her lift her hand in a way sweetly familiar, I began to suspect that the time was not yet come when Pelleas and I were to vanish in such bright wise. Manifestly Pelleas had come to the same conclusion, for when he reached a broad, flat rock beneath a birch he beckoned me to sit there in the shadow where we could watch these strange offices.
But the broad, flat rock proved already to be occupied. As we paused beside it there sprang to his feet a boy who at first glance I protest to have looked quite like a god, he was so tall and fair under the moon. But in spite of that he instantly caught at his cap and shuffled his feet in a fashion which no god would employ.
“Oh,” said he in a voice that I liked, for all his awkward shyness, “I was just sittin’ here, watchin’ ’em.”
Pelleas looked at him closely.
“Are you sure,” demanded Pelleas, “that you are not a shepherd who has conjured up all this, on his pipe?”
He nodded toward the hollow and the young god smiled, looking dreadfully embarrassed as a god would look, charged with being a shepherd of dreams. He had some green thing in his hand which as he stood bashfully drawing it through his fingers gave out a faint, delicious odour.
“Is that mandrake?” asked Pelleas with pleasure.
And to our utter amazement the god answered:—
“Yes, sir. Squeeze it on your eyes and you can see things a good ways off, they say.”