Vivien smiled mournfully as she answered:
"I've always been afraid that you were not really mine, that you didn't love me truly, that you didn't quite trust me, and now you yourself have owned it. Don't you see, dear love, how this strange mood of yours must make me feel it more than ever? must make me yearn still more to prove that you are mine, must make me wish still more to know that great charm of waving hands and woven footsteps that you told me about, just as a proof that you trust me? If you told that to me I should know that you are mine, and I should have the great proof of your love, because I think that however wise you may be you do not know me yet."
"I never was less wise, you inquisitive Vivien," said Merlin, "than when I told you about that charm. Why won't you ask me for another boon?"
Then Vivien, as if she were the tenderest hearted little maid that ever lived, burst into tears and said:
"No, master, don't be angry at your little girl. Caress me, let me feel myself forgiven, for I have not the heart to ask for another boon. I don't suppose that you know the old rhyme, 'Trust not at all or all in all?'"
Then Merlin looked at her and half believed what she said. Her voice was so tender, her face was so fair, her eyes were so sweetly gleaming behind her tears.
He locked her hand in his again and said, "If you should know this charm you might sometimes in a wild moment of anger or a mood of overstrained affection when you wanted me all to yourself or when you were jealous in a sudden fit, you might work it on me."
"Good!" cried Vivien, as if she were angry, "I am not trusted. Well, hide it away, hide it, and I shall find it out, and when I've found it beware, look out for Vivien! When you use me so it's a wonder that I can love you at all, and as for jealousy, it seems to me this wonderful charm was invented just to make me jealous. I suppose you have a lot of pretty girls whom you have caged here and there all over the world with it."
"Long, long years ago," he said, "there lived a King in the farthest East of the East. A tawny pirate who had plundered twenty islands or more anchored his boat in the King's port, and in the boat was a woman. For, as he had passed one of the islands the pirates had seen two cities full of men in boats fighting for a woman on the sea; he had pushed up his black boat in among the rest, lightly scattered every one of them and brought her off with half his people killed with arrows. She was a maiden so smooth, so white, so wonderful that a light seemed to come from her as she walked. When the pirate came upon the shore of the Eastern King's island the King asked him for the woman, but he would not give her up. So the King imprisoned the pirate and made the woman his queen.