and prayed awhile in a great agony of beseeching, after which he said
certain sacred words to the girl for her to repeat to him; he then
arose and blessed her and sprinkled holy-water upon her, and baptized
her into the rites of Christ. When he had done Argathona was still
Argathona in all her outward seeming, but from her mind all memory of
her gift of immortality had vanished, and she thought of herself and of
her life as a shepherd girl might think of herself, and of the eighteen
years that she had laughed and danced through since her mother, that
died in her childhood, had borne her to the sire that she had never
seen. As for the old gods, there was no more memory of them in her mind
than if no man had ever paid them praise in Greece, and the old speech
of the gods was no longer upon her lips, but, instead, the speech of
her mortal lover. All things else she remembered clearly: the finding
of Simon and the coming of Rainouart to the wood, and the treason that
took him from her and her journey to Athens to save him, with all that
followed thereupon. All these things she remembered just as a girl
of eighteen to whom they had happened would remember them, just in
that way and no other way. For Argathona was now no more than a girl
of eighteen years that had lived unwittingly without religion till
she had met the holy man who had welcomed her into the faith of her
fellow-mortals. But the thing that she remembered clearest and best of
all things was that the lover she loved so dearly was waiting for her
outside in the sunlight.
Outside in the sunlight she found him, she walking with the hermit
hand-in-hand. And outside in the sunlight the old pope blessed
Rainouart and Argathona in wedlock, man and maid kneeling before the
shrine. Then Simon brought horses and the three made their escape into
Peloponnesus.
THE END