d he said within himself: "This King of lies shall not slay me, though
mine anguish be hard to bear: for I am alive, and it may be that my love
is in this land, and I may find her here, and how to reach another land I
know not."

So he turned from before the face of the King as the sun was setting, and
he went down the land southward betwixt the mountains and the sea, not
heeding whether it were night or day; and he went on till it was long
past midnight, and then for mere weariness laid him down under a tree,
not knowing where he was, and fell asleep.

And in the morning he woke up to the bright sun, and found folk standing
round about him, both men and women, and their sheep were anigh them, for
they were shepherd folk. So when they saw that he was awake, they
greeted him, and were blithe with him and made much of him: and they took
him home to their house, and gave him to eat and to drink, and asked him
what he would that they might serve him. And they seemed to him to be
kind and simple folk, and though he loathed to speak the words, so sick
at heart he was, yet he told them how he was seeking his troth-plight
maiden, his earthly love, and asked them to say if they had seen any
woman like her.

They heard him kindly and pitied him, and told him how they had heard of
a woman in the land, who sought her beloved even as he sought his. And
when he heard that, his heart leapt up, and he asked them to tell him
more concerning this woman. Then they said that she dwelt in the hill-
country in a goodly house, and had set her heart on a lovely man, whose
image she had seen in a book, and that no man but this one would content
her; and this, they said, was a sad and sorry matter, such as was unheard
of hitherto in the land.

So when Hallblithe heard this, as heavily as his heart fell again, he
changed not countenance, but thanked the kind folk and departed, and went
on down the land betwixt the mountains and the sea, and before nightfall
he had been into three more houses of folk, and asked there of all comers
concerning a woman who was sundered from her beloved; and at none of them
gat he any answer to make him less sorry than yesterday. At the last of
the three he slept, and on the morrow early there was the work to begin
again; and the next day was the same as the last, and the day after
differed not from it. Thus he went on seeking his beloved betwixt the
mountains and the plain, till the great rock-wall came down