Jean FranÇois was right when he called himself poet. Not that he was a maker of verse, for, if it were so, no one had ever seen a single rhyme. But that was his which was far better, perhaps, than writing. He possessed all of the wondrous, painful gifts of the builder of dreams. His was the sympathetic eye for beauty in her subtlest forms. Most men see only the outward and more materialistic things: he saw the deeper, truer meaning which lay at the heart of life. He found mysterious kinship in every living thing from the simplest wayside wild blossom to the complicated soul of man. He could clasp hands with an oak and feel the fine yet strong pulsations of unknown forces which gave personality to a hospitable greenwood. Every little scurrying animal that flew from his path he felt was a part of the great life, and, in a manner, a brother to men. He was a mystic; a lover of ancient lore and the tales of once-upon-a-time; a friend of elves, gnomes, fairies, fays, goblins, and children; and, with all of his knowledge of the world, was exceedingly childlike.

His year had been varied. At times he had worked at bitter tasks and known much of sorrow, despair, hunger, suffering, hardship. He had shared with the poor and loved them. Yet, withal, he had gone through life playing. Without needing a specific reason, he had entered into some of the most whimsical adventures imaginable. His fiftieth birthday found him still a child, making of some of the most serious problems a thing for play. And pray, why not? He filled his place, bore his burdens, but with the graciousness of buoyant youth unlearned in hopelessness and pessimism. He laughed along the way, and the gods, loving him, took care of him and made him happy. Is it any wonder that the elves, the fairies, the children came and ministered unto him? Do you think it anything strange that the fays should light his fire by night, that the pixies should dance before him in the white moonlight, or that Puck should seal his eyes with magic juice of flower and send him laughing and joyous into the delectable land of dreams?... As I have said, Jean FranÇois was right when he called himself a poet.

All of this to help you understand something of the day Nance had as they loafed along the highway, through green sweet-smelling woodlands, by pasture, meadow, field, and plowman, over limpid swelling streams, all in the gentle welcome sunshine of early June. It was always to be remembered as the most wonderful day of all of her life.

For an hour or more after the start, being fatigued by her journey and the strain of her interview with Jean FranÇois, she slept. He walked quietly beside the van, now and then directing Rogue by a word, at times lost in thought, unconsciously gazing at the road at his feet; again, with sweeping glance, scanning the beauty of some purple valley watered by a silver thread of a river. Once, some ladies driving by in an old phaeton became all agog upon seeing the sleeping girl upon the seat. They stopped the pedler and insisted upon his showing them his wares. He did this grudgingly, turning the rear of the cart toward them, apparently to make his goods more accessible, but in reality to hide Nance from their curious gaze. As they drove on, the more bold of them remarked:

"Your daughter is quite beautiful, sir."

"Thank you.... All right, Rogue," said he, and once more they were on the road.

As he walked this time, he studied Nance. She had grown very handsome, Jean FranÇois thought. She possessed charm. Her face was strikingly frank. Her hair was soft and sun-colored, with darker shadows here and there. Her eyes, being closed, showed more plainly the long black lashes and well-arched brows, which made her at once both blonde and brunette. The nose was slender, with sensitive and expressive nostrils. Her mouth was rather wide, with straight lips, the lower of which, like that of Herrick's Julia, seemed bee-stung. The features taken together gave her countenance an intellectual cast, softened and beautified by an air of childlike candor that, when fired by her sparkling, dancing, azure eyes, lent her a look seductive to intoxication. A certain abandon in her sleep brought out more evidently that she was round-limbed, beautifully shaped, and lithe, with lovely swelling breasts.

Jean FranÇois began to understand how Charles Reubelt might have been surprisingly in haste. He turned his gaze to the valleys. They were beautiful in a sheer primitive way, and, even if more awake, also decidedly more quieting subjects for one's admiration.

A little later, upon awakening, she insisted upon being allowed to get down beside him and walk on slightly ahead of the caravan. At last her dream had come true. She was idling down le long trimard with Jean FranÇois, his Pierrett—a lady upon whom she laid no claim—Rogue, and Columbine. She picked flowers; teased Rogue by pokes and inoffensive jabs; tantalized the pedler by asking a thousand childish questions, which he answered with becoming patience; ate voraciously and often; ran and jumped the brooks and insisted upon wading until she was threatened; smiled upon the staring, open-mouthed rustics; insisted upon showing goods at places he wished to hurry by, and, for the sake of selling, making outlandish bargains; and ever and anon breaking into song. At least a half dozen times did she sing the pedler's favorite air:

Once she caroled, much to Jean FranÇois' delight, an old song he had taught her as having been sung by the debonair Henry of Navarre. It especially pleased him because she sang in French:

In the middle of the afternoon they rested for about two hours in a little glade just off the road. It was here, near a branch, that Nance, while wandering about, discovered a rather curious old arrow-head with which she immediately ran to Jean FranÇois.

"That, my dear," said he, "is an elf-arrow."

"An elf-arrow?" she asked.

"Don't you know the elf people, Nance? Their dances and their songs?

he repeated.

"No," said she, "tell me of the elves."

Upon which he launched into whimsical tales concerning elfin-land and the merry little people of the night and the greenwood. It was a new world which he created for her. To be sure she had been reared on fairy tales—but they were without a semblance of fact. Here were chronicles of a real people as related by their friend. He was authority, for was he himself not an elf-child but a few generations removed?

"Comme extrait que je suis de fÉe," said Jean FranÇois, quoting his brother FranÇois Villon.

"Jean FranÇois," she said, when they had resumed their way, "did you know I believe that somewhere among my ancestors there must have been a wonderful gipsy woman? I can fancy her a slender, dark-skinned, black-haired girl with wander-longing in her eyes, loving some bully-rook of a young English gentleman, and, without a thought of to-morrow, allowing herself to be carried off to his home, a sort of stolen bride. Then," said she, "I see her later on, when he has settled down to a very respectable ale-drinking, big-paunched squire, eating her heart out for the roads, the camp, and the crimson sky of morning.... What do you think?"

"I think, young woman," said he, with a humorous twitching about his mouth, "that you must be mistaken. In the first place, such a maid as you describe could not be quite so badly fooled in her man.... In the second place, Nance, Charles isn't really half so stupid as you are making him out to be."

"O!" she exclaimed in hurt surprise.

For the next hour she kept well ahead of him, refusing to be inveigled into any topic of conversation whatever. She could have done nothing more in harmony with his mood. Jean FranÇois wanted a time for thought. Night was coming on. There was a question upon his mind that made him laugh to himself when he realized its nature. It caused him to think of Aunt Barbara. He knew what she would have advised straightway.... What would Nance expect? Should he stop at the next farmhouse and leave her a victim for the spare bedroom? Heaven forbid! And yet—

He raised his eyes and with pleasure watched, as she walked with ample stride before him, the graceful, free motions of her body. After all how like a gipsy's were her movements. He thought of what she had just said concerning a woman who might have been her mother. This led him to wondering about her father and mother. He had never given her parentage a thought before. He knew that they were dead, and that Doctor Longstreet was certainly her grandfather. No elf-child, she. Yet there was a strain of wild, untamed blood in her that he could scarcely account for in the staid, conventional family of which she was a member. For, notwithstanding his rebellion against Miss Barbara's sense of propriety, the old physician was distinctly the product of the civilization of the aristocratic South.

She is of herself complete, he thought, and no man's child. Then it suddenly occurred to him that she was just such a being to whom he would have loved to have been father. She was his child! The idea pleased him and he smiled. So far as concerned kith and kin he was alone in the world. Also had he not touched her sensitive mind and quickened it into a genuine understanding of the life of the highways, the woodland, and all of the birds therein, the river, the poetry of the starlight, the sunshine and the moonbeams? Had he not shown to her the ways of fairies and elf-kings?... In fact was she—the real, true, immortal she—not his creation? Did not the dominant spirit within her bear a close likeness to his own phantasmagoric soul? Indeed, in his own image he had fashioned her.... She was his child!... He would have her for his daughter. No one could prevent.... He raised his head and called her.

She, who waited for him to catch up with her, saw a gentle, tender humor in his eyes, a sweet smile upon his lips, which bespoke confidence and trust. With childlike faith she put her hand in his and together they walked down the hill into the coming twilight.