“I think you are mad!”

Mike laughed and continued—­

“I was so when I was sixteen.  There was a girl staying there.  Her hair was copper, and her flesh was pink and white.  Her waist, you could span it.  I saw her walking one day on ...”

“You must mean Lady Alice Hargood, a very tall girl?”

“Yes; five feet seven, quite.  I saw her walking on the terrace with your uncle.  Once she passed our house, and I smarted with shame of it as of some restless wound, and for days I remembered I was little better than a peasant.  Originally we came, as you know, of good English stock, but nothing is vital but the present.  I cried and cursed my existence, my father and the mother that bore me, and that night I climbed out by my window and roved through the dark about the castle so tall in the moonlight.  The sky that night was like a soft blue veil, and the trees were painted quite black upon it.  I looked for her window, and I imagined her sleeping with her copper hair tossed in the moonlight, like an illustration in a volume of Shelley.

“You remember the old wooden statue of a nymph that stood in the sycamores at the end of the terraces; she was the first naked woman I saw.  I used to wander about her, sometimes at night, and I have often climbed about and hung round those shoulders, and ever since I have always met that breast of wood.  You have been loved more truly; you have been possessed of woman more thoroughly than I. Though I clasp a woman in my arms, it is as if the Atlantic separated us.  Did I never tell you of my first love affair?  That was the romance of the wood nymph.  One evening I climbed on the pedestal of my divinity, my cheek was pale ...”

“For God’s sake, leave out the poetics, and come to the facts.”

“If you don’t let me tell my story in my own way I won’t tell it at all.  Out of my agony prayer rose to Alice, for now it pleased me to fancy there was some likeness between this statue and Lady Alice.  The dome of leafage was sprinkled with the colour of the sunset, and as I pressed my lips to the wooden statue, I heard dead leaves rustling under a footstep.  Holding the nymph with one arm, I turned and saw a lady approaching.  She asked me why I kissed the statue.  I looked away embarrassed, but she told me not to go, and she said, ’You are a pretty boy.’  I said I had never seen a woman so beautiful.  Again I grew ashamed, but the lady laughed.  We stood talking in the stillness.  She said I had pretty hands, and asked me if I regretted the nymph was not a real woman.  She took my hands.  I praised hers, and then I grew frightened, for I knew she came from the castle; the castle was to me what the Ark of the Covenant was to an Israelite.  She put her arm about me, and my fears departed in the thrilling of an exquisite minute.  She kissed me and said, ‘Let us sit down.’”

“I wonder who she was!  What was her name?  You can tell me.”