"I will make you a crown," he said. "A crown for a May Queen. But you must give me something, in exchange."
"I haven't got anything to give."
"Oh, just a lock of hair-a very fine one-to remember you by."
"Like a fairy story."
Just so.
So he made her a crown, on a base of pliant twigs from the coppiced hedge, and wove in it green fronds and trails of all colours, ivy and ferns, silvery grasses and the starry leaves of bryony, the wild clematis. And he studded it with roses and honeysuckle and fringed it with belladonna ("but you know that you must never eat this," he said and she replied scornfully that she knew all about what she must not eat, she had been told often enough).
"There," he said, crowning the little pale head. "Full beautiful, a fairy's child. Or like Proserpine. Do you know
"that fair field Of Enna, where Proserpina, gathering flowers, Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis Was gathered, which cost Ceres all that pain To seek her through the world?"
She looked at him, proud and still a little scornful, holding her head steady under its burden. "I have an aunt who is always telling me poems like that. But I don't like poetry."
He took out a little pair of pocket scissors, and cut, very gently, a long lock from the buttercup-gold floss which fell about her shoulders in a great cloud.
"Here," she said, "I'll plait it for you, to keep it tidily."
Whilst her little fingers worked, and her face frowned over her work, he said, "I am sorry you don't like poetry, as I am a poet."
"Oh, I like you, " she hastened to say. "You make lovely things and don't fuss-" She held out the finished plait, which he wound in a fine coil, and put into the back of his watch.
"Tell your aunt," he said, "that you met a poet, who was looking for the Belle Dame Sans Merci, and who met you instead, and who sends her his compliments, and will not disturb her, and is on his way to fresh woods and pastures new."
"I'll try to remember," she said, steadying her crown. So he kissed her, always matter-of-fact, so as not to frighten her, and went on his way.
And on the way home, she met her brothers, and there was a rough-and-tumble, and the lovely crown was broken, and she forgot the message, which was never delivered.