e slipped from its fellow on the chain. Then she ran
with it to the gate, and Martin held up his little finger, and she put
it on, saying:

"Now you will keep your promise, honey-sweet singer, and play a dance
for a May evening when the blossom blows for happiness on the
apple-trees."

So Martin Pippin tuned his lute and sang what follows, while the girls
floated in ones and twos among the orchard grass:

A-floating, a-floating, what saw I a-floating?
Fairy ships rocking with pink sails and white
Smoothly as swans on a river of light
Saw I a-floating?
No, it was apple-bloom, rosy and fair,
Softly obeying the nod of the air
I saw a-floating.
A-floating, a-floating, what saw I a-floating?
White clouds at eventide blown to and fro
Lightly as bubbles the cherubim blow,
Saw I a-floating?
No, it was pretty girls gowned like a flower
Blown in a ring round their own apple-bower
I saw a-floating.
Or was it my dream, my dream only--who knows?--
As frail as a snowflake, as flushed as a rose,
I saw a-floating?
A-floating, a-floating, what saw I a-floating?

Martin sang, and the milkmaids danced, and Gillian in her prison only
heard the dropping of her tears, and only saw the rainbow prisms on her
lashes. But presently she laid her cheek against her hand, and missed a
touch she knew; and on that revealed her lovely face so full of woe,
that Martin needs must comfort her or weep himself. And the dancers
took no heed when he made one step across the gate and went under the
trees to the Well-House.

"Oh, Mother, Mother!" sighed Gillian, "if you had only lived they would
never have stolen the ring from my finger while I sat heartsick."

Above her head a whispering voice replied, "Oh, Daughter, Daughter,
mend your dear heart! You shall wear this other ring when yours is gone
over the duckpond to Adversane."

Oh wonder! Out of the very heavens fell a silver ring into her bosom.
And if that night Gillian slept not, neither wept she.

PART III

In the beginning of the first week in September Martin Pippin came once
more to Adversane, and he said to himself when he saw it:

"Now this is the prettiest hamlet I ever had the luck to light on in my
wanderings. And if chance or fortune will, I shall some day come this
way again."

While he was thinking these thoughts, his ears were assailed by groans
and sighs, so that he wet his finger and held it up to find which way
the wind blew on