ow, and looked no
more into the green grass, but across the green duckpond.

"The second song seems to me as irrelevant as the first," said
Joscelyn, "but I observe that you cuckooed so loudly as to startle our
mistress out of her inattention. So if you mean to tell us another
story, by all means tell it now. Not that I care, except for our
extremity."

"It is my only object to ease it," said Martin, "so bear with me as
well as you may during the recital of Young Gerard."

YOUNG GERARD

There was once, dear maidens, a shepherd who kept his master's sheep on
Amberley Mount. His name was Gerard, and he was always called Young
Gerard to distinguish him from the other shepherd who was known as Old
Gerard, yet was not, as you might suppose, his father. Their master was
the Lord of Combe Ivy that lay in the southern valleys of the hills
toward the sea; he owned the grazing on the whole circle of the Downs
between the two great roads--on Amberley and Perry and Wepham and
Blackpatch and Cockhill and Highdown and Barnsfarm and Sullington and
Chantry. But the two Gerards lived together in the great shed behind
the copse between Rackham Hill and Kithurst, and the way they came to
do so was this.

One night in April when Old Gerard's gray beard was still brown, the
door of the shed was pushed open, letting in not only the winds of
Spring but a woman wrapped in a green cloak, with a lining of
cherry-color and a border of silver flowers and golden cherries. In one
hand she swung a crystal lantern set in a silver frame, but it had no
light in it; and in the other she held a small slip of a cherry-tree,
but it had no bloom on it. Her dress was white, or had been; for the
skirts of it, and her mantle, were draggled and sodden, and her green
shoes stained and torn, and her long fair hair lay limp and dank upon
her mantle whose hood had fallen away, and the shadows round her blue
eyes were as black as pools under hedgerows thawing after a frost, and
her lovely face was as white as the snowbanks they bed in. Behind her
came another woman in a duffle cloak, a crone with eyes as black as
sloes, and a skin as brown as beechnuts, and unkempt hair like the
fireless smoke of Old Man's Beard straying where it will on the
November woodsides. She too was wet and soiled, but full of life where
the young one seemed full of death.

The Shepherd looked at this strange pair and said surlily, "What want
ye?"

"Shelter," replied the crone.