ou 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
aside, for he had much to think of, having been upon the other side of
the mountain, and having seen cities and camps and courts,--for indeed
he was not always shepherd. And now, because his thoughts left the plain
to hover over the place where danger is, to visit strange coasts and
Ultima Thule, to strain ever towards those islands of the blest where
goes the man who has endured to the end, his notes when he sang or when
he played became warlike, resolved, speaking of death and fame and stern
things, or of things of public weal.... But all the time the shepherd
was a lonely man, because his spirit was too busy to find ease for
itself, and because, though he had helped other shepherds in the
building of their cottages, his own heart had no hearthstone where he
might warm himself and be content. Sometimes as he lay alone upon the
bare earth, counting the stars, he caught the gleam from such a home
clear shining over the plain, and he told himself that when he had
numbered all the stars like sheep in a fold, then would he turn and give
his heart rest beside some lower light.... So he kept on with his
Phrygian melodies, and they brought him friends and enemies; but no
lover hastening over the plain stayed to listen, and the shepherd was
sorry for that, because he thought that the others, though they heard,
did not fully understand."

The narrator paused. The maid of honor's hands were idle in her lap;
with level gaze she sat in a dream. "Yet some there be who might have
understood," she said, and scarce knew that she had spoken.

"Now Cleon had a friend whom he loved, the shepherd Astrophel, who sang