"It sounds rather like a fog-horn," said Rosalind, still in the critic's vein; "but I suppose it is the proper thing. Now," she continued, and quite visibly brightening, "you can pretend to have an unrequited attachment for me."
"Can't," she echoed. It has not been mentioned previously that Rosalind was pretty. She was especially so just now, in pouting. And, therefore, "--pretend," I added.
"Nor," I continued, with firmness, "am I a shambling, nameless, unshaven denizen of Arden, who hasn't anything to do except to carry a spear and fall over it occasionally. I will no longer conceal the secret of my identity. I am Jaques."
"You can't be Jaques," she dissented; "you are too stout."
"I am well-built," I admitted, modestly; "as in an elder case, sighing and grief have blown me up like a bladder; yet proper pride, if nothing else, demands that my name should appear on the programme."
"But would Jaques be the sort of person who'd--?"
"Who wouldn't be?" I asked, with appropriate ardour. "No, depend upon it, Jaques was not any more impervious to temptation than the rest of us; and, indeed, in the French version, as you will find, he eventually married Celia."
"Minx!" said she; and it seemed to me quite possible that she referred to Celia Reindan, and my heart glowed.
"And how," queried Rosalind, presently, "came you to the Forest of Arden, good Jaques?"
I groaned once more. "It was a girl," I darkly said.
"Of course," assented Rosalind, beaming as to the eyes. Then she went on, and more sympathetically: "Now, Jaques, you can tell me the whole story."
"Surely," said she, with sudden interest in the structure of pine-cones; "since for a long while I have wanted to know all about Jaques. You see Mr. Shakespeare is a bit hazy about him."
And aloud, "It is an old story," I warned her, "perhaps the oldest of all old stories. It is the story of a man and a girl. It began with a chance meeting and developed into a packet of old letters, which is the usual ending of this story."
"Sometimes," I conceded, "it culminates in matrimony; but the ending is not necessarily tragic."
I dodged exactly in time; and the pine-cone splashed into the hazard.
"It happened," I continued, "that, on account of the man's health, they were separated for a whole year's time before--before things had progressed to any extent. When they did progress, it was largely by letters. That is why this story ended in such a large package.