es.

Joyce: It is true I am disappointed. Because the beautiful lady is
dead, and how can a love-story be, if half the lovers are dead?

Martin: Dear Mistress Joyce, what has love to do with death? Love and
death are strangers and speak in different tongues. Women may die and
men may die, but lovers are ignorant of mortality.

Joyce (pouting): That may be, singer. But lovers are also a man and a
woman, and the woman is dead, and the love-tale ended before we have
even heard it. You should not have let the woman die. What sort of
love-tale is this, now the woman is dead?

Martin: Are not more nests than one built in a spring-time?--Give me, I
pray you, two hairs of your head.

She plucked two and gave them to him, turning her pouting to laughing.
One of them Martin coiled and held before his lips, and blew on it.

"There it flies," said he, and gave her back the second hair. "Hold
fast by this and keep it from its fellow with all your might, for to
part true mates baffles the forces of the universe. And when you give
me this second hair again I swear I will send it where it will find its
fellow. But I will never ask for it until, my story ended, you say to
me, I am content.'")

Examining the child (repeated Martin) the Shepherd discovered it to be
a lusty boy-child, and this rejoiced him, so that while the baby wept
he laughed aloud.

"It is better to weep for something than for nothing," said he, "and to
laugh for something likewise. Tears are for serfs and laughter is for
freedmen." For he had conceived the plan of selling the child to his
master, the Lord of Combe Ivy, and buying his freedom with the purchase
money. So in the morning he carried the body of the lady into the heart
of the copse, and there he dug a grave and laid her in it in her white
gown. And afterwards he went up hill and down dale to his master, and
said he had a man for sale. The Lord of Combe Ivy, who was a jovial
lord and a bachelor, laughed at the tale he had to tell; but being
always of the humor for a jest he paid the Shepherd a gold piece for
the child, and promised him another each midnight on the anniversary of
its birth; but on the twenty-first anniversary, he said, the Shepherd
was to bring back the twenty-one gold pieces he had received, and
instead of adding another to them he would take them again, and make
the serf a freedman, and the child his serf.

"For," said the Lord of Combe Ivy, "an infant is a poor deal for a man