, "Come now, and tell me your
name. For though love needs none for its object, I think the name
itself is eager to be made known and loved beyond all other names for
love's sake. As I love yours, whatever it be."

"My name," she said, "is Margaret."

"It is an easy name to love," said Hobb, "for its own sake."

"And what is yours?" asked she.

And Hobb's smile broadened as he answered, "Try to love it, for my
sake. For it is Hobb. Yet it is as fitting to me, who am as plain as my
name, as your lovely name is fitting to you."

She cast a quick sly look at him and said, "If love knows not how to
distinguish between joy and pain, since all that comes from the heart
of love is joy, neither can it tell the plain from the beautiful, since
all that comes under the eye of love is beauty. And I will find all
things beautiful in my lover, from his name to the mole on his cheek."

For I know now, dear maidens, whether in describing him I had mentioned
this peculiarity of Hobb's.

(Jessica: You hadn't described him at all.

Martin: Well, now the omission is remedied.

Jessica: Oh fie! as though it were enough to say the man had a mole on
his left cheek!

Martin: Dear Mistress Jessica, did I say it was his left cheek?

Jessica: Why--why!--where else would it be?

Martin: Nowhere else, on my honor. It WAS his left cheek.)

Then Hobb said to Margaret, "What place is this?"

"It is called Open Winkins," said she, and at the name he started to
his feet, remembering much that he had forgotten. She looked at him
anxiously and cajolingly and said, "You are not going away?" But he
hardly heard her question. "Margaret," he said, "I have come from a
place that may be far or near, for I do not know how I came; but I
think it must be far, since I never saw this forest, or even heard of
it, till a moment before my coming. But I am seeking a clue to a
trouble that has come upon me this year, and I think the clue may be
here. And now tell me, have you in these last four months seen in these
woods anything of your people that are my brothers?--a child that once
was merry, and a boy that once was brave, and a youth that once was
beautiful, and a young man that once was wise? Have these ever been to
Open Winkins?"

Margaret looked at him thoughtfully and said, "If they have, I have not
seen them here. And I think they could not have been here without my
knowledge. For no one lives here but I, and I live nowhere else."

Hobb si