Ferne had caught her by the wrists. "No, no! Dear lady, to whom I am
wellnigh a stranger--sweetheart with whom I have talked scarce thrice in
all my life--my Dione, to whom my heart is as a crystal, to whom I have
written all things! I must speak now, now before I go this voyage! Think
you it is in me to vex with saucy words, to make a mock of any
gentle lady?"

"I know not what to think," she answered, in a strange voice. "I am too
dull to understand."

"Think that I tell you God's truth!" he cried. "Understand that--" He
checked himself, seeing how pale she was and how flutteringly came her
breath; then, trained as she herself to instantly draw an airy veil
between true feeling and the exigency of the moment, he became once more
the simple courtier. "You read the songs that I make, sweet lady," he
said, "and now will you listen while I tell you a story, a _novelle_? So
I may make you to understand."

As he spoke he motioned to the mossy bank which she had quitted. She
raised her troubled eyes to his; then, with her scarlet lip between her
teeth, she took her seat again. For a minute there was silence in the
little grove, broken only by the distant voices of the players whose
company she had forsworn; then Ferne began his story:

"In a fair grassy plain, not many leagues removed from the hill
Parnassus, a shepherd named Cleon sat upon a stone, piping to himself
while he watched his sheep, and now and then singing aloud, so that the
other shepherds and dwellers of the plain, and travellers through it,
paused to hear his song. He sang not often, and often he laid his pipe