But it was a magnanimous godship; and, after a moment’s leaning back with closed eyes, to draw in all the sweet incense, how nobly would he act, in imaginative vignette, the King Cophetua to this poor suppliant of love; with what a generous waiving of his power—­and with what a grace!—­did he see himself raising her from her knees, and seating her at his right hand.  Yet those pencil-marks, alas! mark but a secondary interest in that volume.  A little sketch on the fly-leaf, ’by another hand,’ witness the prettier memory.  A sacred valley, guarded by smooth, green hills; in the midst a little lake, fed at one end by a singing stream, swallowed at the other by the roaring darkness of a mill; green rushes prosperous in the shallows, and along the other bank an old hedgerow; a little island in the midst, circled by silver lilies; and in the distance, rising from out a cloud of tangled green, above the little river, an old church tower.  Below, though not ‘in the picture,’ a quaint country house, surrounded by a garden of fair fruit-trees and wonderful bowers, through which ran the stream, free once again, and singing for joy of the light.  In the great lone house a solitary old man, cherished and ruled by—­’The Miller’s Daughter.’  Was scene ever more in need of a fairy prince?  Narcissus sighed, as he broke upon it one rosy evening, to think what little meaning all its beauty had, suffering that lack; but as he had come thither with the purpose, at once firm and vague, of giving it a memory, he could afford to sigh till morning’s light brought, maybe, the opportunity of that transfiguring action.  He was to spend an Easter fortnight there, as the guest of some farmer-relatives with whom he had stayed years before, in a period to which, being nineteen, he already alluded as his ‘boyhood.’

And it is not quite accurate to say that it had no memory for him, for he brought with him one of that very miller’s daughter, though, indeed, it was of the shadowiest silver.  It had chanced at that early time that an influx of visitors to the farm had exceeded the sleeping room, and he and another little fellow had been provided with a bed in the miller’s house.  He had never quite forgotten that bedroom—­its huge old-fashioned four-poster, slumbrous with great dark hangings, such as Queen Elizabeth seems always to have slept in; its walls dim with tapestry, and its screen of antique bead-work.  But it was round the toilet table that memory grew brightest, for thereon was a crystal phial of a most marvellous perfume, and two great mother-of-pearl shells, shedding a mystical radiance—­the most commonplace Rimmel’s, without doubt, and the shells ‘dreadful,’ one may be sure.  But to him, as he took a reverent breath of that phial, it seemed the very sweetbriar fragrance of her gown that caught his sense; and, surely, he never in all the world found scent like that again.  Thus, long after, she would come to him in day-dreams, wafted on its strange sweetness, and clothed about with that mystical lustre of pearl.