went I will tell thee nought as now, because sure it
is that if we both live, thou and I shall tread that road together, but
with our faces turned the other way; for it is the road from the Well
at the World's End, where I myself have been, or else never had thine
eyes fallen on me."

Ralph said, "Even so much I deemed by reading in the book; yet it was
not told clearly that thou hadst been there." "Yea," she said, because
the said book was made not by my friends but my foes, and they would
have men deem that my length of days and the endurance of my beauty and
never-dying youth of my heart came from evil and devilish sources; and
if thou wilt trust my word it is not so, for in the Well at the World's
End is no evil, but only the Quenching of Sorrow, and Clearing of the
Eyes that they may behold. And how good it is that they look on thee
now. And moreover, the history of that book is partly false of
intention and ill-will, and partly a confused medley of true and false,
which has come of mere chance-hap.

"Hearken now," she said, "till I tell thee in few words what befell me
before I came to drink the Water of the Well. After we had passed long
deserts of wood and heath, and gone through lands exceeding evil and
perilous, and despaired of life for the horror of those places, and
seen no men, we came at last amongst a simple folk who dealt kindly
with us, yea, and more. These folk seemed to me happy and of good
wealth, though to my lord they seemed poor and lacking of the goods of
the world. Forsooth, by that time we lacked more than they, for we
were worn with cold and hunger, and hard life: though for me, indeed,
happy had been the days of my wayfaring, but my lord remembered the
days of his riches and the kingdom of his father, and the worship of
mighty men, and all that he had promised me on the happy day when I
first beheld him: so belike he was scarce so happy as I was.

"It was springtime when we came to that folk; for we had worn through
the autumn and winter in getting clear of the wilderness. Not that the
way was long, as I found out afterwards, but that we went astray in the
woodland, and at last came out of it into a dreadful stony waste which
we strove to cross thrice, and thrice were driven back into the
greenwood by thirst and hunger; but the fourth time, having gotten us
store of victual by my woodcraft, we overpassed it and reached the
peopled country.

"Yea, spring was on the earth, as we, my