would meet the road again, and in half an hour they would be at
Hidvar.

Then the goatherd, who was well acquainted with all the meanderings of
the valley, took the horse's rein and conducted the lady to the mountain
pass, where the beaten track began again. There he kissed her hand and
parted from her.

"I must now go back," said he, "for they are waiting for me."

"Who?"

"My goats and my wife."

"Then you have a wife? Do you love her?"

"Love her?" cried the herdsman proudly,--and then he added in a lower
voice: "She is as beautiful as your ladyship!--_Buna nopte, Domna_!"[22]

[Footnote 22: Good night, my lady.]

And without waiting for an answer, he plunged back into the forest,
disappearing by leaps and bounds.

When Henrietta got home she said not a word to anyone about what had
taken place, though the condition of the horse and his harness sufficed
to show that an accident had happened. But she could scarce wait for the
morrow to come, bringing along with it Todor Ruban, from whom she meant
to find out everything relating to Juon Tare.[23]

[Footnote 23: From the Roumanian _Taria_, strength, solidity.]

CHAPTER IX

THE GEINA MAID-MARKET

"Would your ladyship believe,"--so Todor[24] Ruban began his story of
Juon the strong,--"sitting here as you do by the fireside, accustomed
from your birth to every elegant luxury, with a particular servant
always ready to fly obediently to accomplish each separate command, and
with different glasses and porcelain for each several course at
meals--would your ladyship believe, I ask, that there are people in this
world who know not what it is to have a roof above their heads when they
go to sleep, who would not recognize a bed or a dinner service if they
saw them, nay, who often are in want of bread--and yet, for all that,
are happy?

[Footnote 24: Theodore.]

"And yet such people live quite close to us. We need not think of the
savage inhabitants of Oceania,--we can see enough of them and to spare
in this very place. Your ladyship can hear from your balcony the
melancholy songs of their pastoral flutes, especially of an evening,
when the milch-goats are returning from the deep valleys.

"The herdsman here never sleeps beneath a roof either summer or winter;
every spring he counts the goats of his master's herds and the half of
every increase belongs to him; nobody enquires how he lives there among
his herds in the lofty mountain-passes, how he defend