Gradually, age dimmed the memory. Only the central core of dissatisfaction remained, keeping him ever so slightly off-balance, making him wonder whether the life he contemplated as a farmer of hvee was actually the very best available. Yet—what else could there be?

He was a young man of fourteen, transplanting infant hvee near the edge of the property, when the distant melody came a second time. His hands shook. Had she—had she returned at last to the glade?

He set his plants aside and followed the magic sound, now eager, now holding back. Excitement pounded in him as he circled the disused deep well within the forest. Was there really a nymph? Did she summon him?

He arrived at the glade, which was almost unchanged from his memory of seven years. She was there! She was there, sitting and singing, her quick fingers rippling over the little instrument—an off-world, six-stringed lute—lovely beyond belief. The ancient image in his mind faded before the new reality. The forest, the glade, the very air about her was beautiful.

He stood at the edge, absorbing her presence. It seemed only a moment since he had stood this way before; the intervening time a lonely dream—a moment and an eternity. She had not changed—he was the one who had aged seven years. And what he saw now was not what he had seen as the child of seven.

She wore a light green dress, translucent in the spot of sunlight, laced up the front in a bodice unused on Hvee. Her face was pale and fair, framed by the luster of hair that flowed deep red and deep black in fascinating alliance. There was a gentle fullness in her figure, not voluptuous, not slim. Her aspect represented a juxtaposition of opposites that Aton had never consciously realized he was searching for. Fire and water, so often at war, here merged into exquisite focus like the crossing scales of the vernier.

He stood entranced, forgetting time and self in the delight of that study.

She spied him, as before, and put aside her song. “Aton, Aton, come to me.”

She knew him! He stood before the lovely woman, embarrassed, flushed by the first ungainly surges of manhood. She was man’s desire, and in her presence he felt great and crude, conscious of the earth on his hands and the sweat on his shirt. He could not stay; he could not leave.

“Fourteen,” she said, putting her magic into that word. “Fourteen. Already you are taller than I.” She stood, unfolding as a flower, to show that it was true.

“And you are wearing my hvee,” she said, reaching up to take it from his hair. It nested in her hand, its green blossom hardly darker than her dress. “Will you give it to me now, Aton?”