Part 6

"My name is Argathona. I belong to the forest. I am a dryad."

Simon's education had been something neglected, and he had no idea what a dryad might be. But he was always superstitious, and now suddenly suspicious.

"Are you a fairy?" he gasped, fearfully.

Argathona shook her head, and waved the myrtle-bough as if to dissipate his fears.

"I have naught to do with the fairies, nor they with me. I am the daughter of a dryad, but my father was a mortal man."

"Like me," Simon suggested. Simon plumed himself on his good looks, but the dryad disagreed.

"I do not think he can have been like you, for my mother said he was beautiful."

Simplicity's frank arrow quivered in vanity's ample target. Simon swallowed an oath.

"Oh, oh," he thought, "this is some rustic minx who is making game of me. Well, I'll humor her whimsy; perhaps we may end with a kiss." He went on aloud, "When were you born, bonnie lassie?"

"Long ago," the girl answered, gravely, "when the old gods still dwelt in Hellas."

Simon's bulk was as full of stifled laughter as a pillow is full of feathers.

"Perhaps you remember the old gods," he hinted, with a grin. The girl's calm eyes widened with wonder at his folly.

"Assuredly I do. How could I forget my earliest friends? They loved me so dearly that though I was the child of a mortal they gave me the gift of immortal youth."

Simon gave a long whistle.

"So you are immortal?"

"My mother was a true dryad," Argathona answered, "born in a tree, living the tree's life, and dying when the tree died. But she loved an Athenian and bore me, and as there was no tree in all the woodland that I could call my own, Zeus gave me this gift to live forever so long as a tree should grow in Greece."

"And your parents?" Simon inquired, politely. He was so taken with the girl that he would not quarrel with her crazy tale.

"My father died long ages ago," Argathona said, "when I was a baby. He died in fight upon the plain of Troy, died by the hand of Paris, the lover of Helena. Hermes brought the news to my mother here in the wood, and my mother wept sorely and sighed in vain to die. This was long ago, long before the time came for the gods to go."

She sighed as she spoke, as one who lingers with tender, pathetic memories. Simon continued his humoring, though the girl was flagrantly insane.

"When was that, pray you?"

"I cannot truly tell you. I was but a child, and had seen no more than some few hundred summers. They were banished, all the beautiful gods, into the twilight, into the Hollow Land. They came to say us farewell, the great gods, the Cloud-Compeller and his queen, and the Lord of the Sun and the Lady of the Moon and sea-born Aphrodite and Virgin Athena and all the Olympians with them. They rode away in a noble company, and I stood with my mother under the shade of my mother's oak and watched them as they went."

This was more than Simon could patiently stomach, and he let some laughter slip.

"Of course you expect me to believe all this?" he chuckled, irreverently. The dryad answered him tranquilly.

"Why should I deceive you, mortal? My mother could not leave her oak, so the gods would have taken me to dwell in the Twilight Land, but I would not leave my mother, and we lost the adorable gods and lingered here in the greenwood. Here my mother taught me all the woodland arts, woodcraft, and glamour, and the speech of the beasts and the meaning of what the birds sing and the trees whisper, and the properties of the plants for heal and for hurt, and how to weave and spin and be familiar with the stars--and all the things that it is needful for a dryad to know. But soon my mother vanished as a mist of the morning, for the oak grew old and withered, and its time had come and hers. I have lived here all alone ever since."

"All alone!" Simon echoed, sceptically, and "All alone!" the white child repeated simply. There was no sound of sadness in her voice, no shadow of sadness in her eyes. She spoke of strange things as naturally as Simon would have talked of his breakfast or his boots or any other workaday matter. Cunning leered in Simon's eyes, cunning lurked in Simon's voice as he chuckled his next question:

"No mortal lover?"

Argathona answered him with a grave simplicity that took the sting out of his sneer.

"I have never left this greenwood; I have never longed to leave it. What use were it for me to make friends with your race who die in a day?"