"I beg! I beg! Do not, I pray, good nymph, torture me with thy dreadful power.

I swear that I will obey thy every wish and whim." Pointing with her bow--as with a wand--to the boulder, she sternly commanded, "Come, then, and sit here upon this rock; and give to me an account of all that thou hast done since I left thee in the rose garden or I will split thy ears and stretch thy soul upon a torture rack of hideous noise." She lifted her violin again, threateningly.

The novelist came down the path, on a run, to seat himself upon the gray boulder.
The artist shouted with laughter.

But the novelist and the girl paid no heed to his unseemly merriment.
"Speak,"-- she commanded, waving her wand,--"what hast thou done ?" "Did I not obey thy will and, under such terms as I could procure, open for thee the treasure room of thy desire ?" growled the man on the rock.
"And still," she retorted, "when I made myself subject to those terms, and obediently looked not upon the hidden mystery--still the room of my desires became a trap betraying me into rude hands from which I narrowly escaped.

And you--you fled the scene of your wrong-doing, without so much as by-your-leave, and for these long weeks have wandered, irresponsible, among my hills.