THE KING OF ELFLAND’S DAUGHTER
their suspicions still. So that when the men were gone to the forge of Narl, and their houses were quiet in the moonlight and Narl’s windows glowed, and the mead had gone round, and they talked of the future of Erl, more and more voices joining in the tale of its coming glory, on soft feet the dogs would come out to the sandy street and howl.
And to the high sunny nursery Lirazel would come, bringing a brightness that the learned witch had not in all her spells, and would sing to her boy those songs that none can sing to us here, for they were learned the other side of the frontier of twilight and were made by singers all unvexed by Time. And for all the marvel that there was in those songs, whose origin was so far from the fields we know, and in times remote from those that historians use; and though men wondered at the strangeness of them when from open casements through the summer days they drifted over Erl; yet none wondered even at those as she wondered at the earthly ways of her child and all the little human things that he did more and more as he grew. For all human ways were strange to her. And yet she loved him more than her father’s realm, or the glittering centuries of her ageless youth, or the palace that may be told of only in song.
In those days Alveric learned that she would never now grow familiar with earthly things, never understand the folk that dwelt in the valley, never read
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