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Ask; I will not deny, within the strength

Courage and Honor may descry in me.

Ask of my service to the utmost length

And I will give it thee.

Marguerite was sitting on the short salt-grass at the top of the souffleur cliff. Beside her was a large reed basket, half filled with mousserons—those toothsome little pale-yellow mushrooms that grow in perfect circles all over the table-land—perfect circles, from which, however, one mushroom is always missing, because these erratic cryptogams appear only where the Farfadets (elves) have danced during the night, a member of their company lying on watch at full length upon the ground while they merrily disport themselves in an all but complete ronde.

The gray-green sward was still dotted with the quaint formation close to Marguerite, but she had stopped harvesting them, and sat idly—a strange thing for her to do—evidently absorbed in the evolutions of the gulls, which kept plunging headlong down to the blue waves, apparently for no other purpose than to fly immediately up again and preen their plumage in the veiled sunlight of the cliff-top.