Page:Of Six Mediaeval Women (1913).djvu/81

 lord. The knight has to yield to their demands and to consent to accept in marriage the daughter of a neighbouring noble who had made it known that he desired him for son-in-law. Neither lover utters any complaint or reproach, and the needful sacrifice is about to be made. But fortune, sometimes kind, intervenes ere it is too late, and reveals the noble birth of the loved one. The knight weds her with great joy, and to complete this happy picture we read that the other lady returned with her parents to her own domain, and was there well bestowed in marriage.

This idea of mutual sympathy and sacrifice gives meaning also to the lay of "The Two Lovers," and to that of "Yonec," but perhaps it is most simply, yet forcibly, summed up in the lay of "The Honeysuckle," an episode taken from the Tristan story. Tristan, hearing that Isolde is to ride through a certain wood on her way to Tintagel to attend the Pentecostal Court held by the King, hides in the wood. Here he cuts a branch of hazel round which honeysuckle has twined, and carving his name and certain letters on it, he lays it in the way by which the Queen must pass, knowing that she will recognise it as a sign that her lover is near, since they have met before in suchwise. The import of the writing is that he has long been waiting to see her, since without her he cannot live, and that they two are like the hazel branch with the encircling honeysuckle, the which, as long