“Or like a chain of flowers,” responded Donatello, drawing her along by that which he had twined.  “This way!—­Come!”

CHAPTER X

THE SYLVAN DANCE

As the music came fresher on their ears, they danced to its cadence, extemporizing new steps and attitudes.  Each varying movement had a grace which might have been worth putting into marble, for the long delight of days to come, but vanished with the movement that gave it birth, and was effaced from memory by another.  In Miriam’s motion, freely as she flung herself into the frolic of the hour, there was still an artful beauty; in Donatello’s, there was a charm of indescribable grotesqueness hand in hand with grace; sweet, bewitching, most provocative of laughter, and yet akin to pathos, so deeply did it touch the heart.  This was the ultimate peculiarity, the final touch, distinguishing between the sylvan creature and the beautiful companion at his side.  Setting apart only this, Miriam resembled a Nymph, as much as Donatello did a Faun.

There were flitting moments, indeed, when she played the sylvan character as perfectly as he.  Catching glimpses of her, then, you would have fancied that an oak had sundered its rough bark to let her dance freely forth, endowed with the same spirit in her human form as that which rustles in the leaves; or that she had emerged through the pebbly bottom of a fountain, a water-nymph, to play and sparkle in the sunshine, flinging a quivering light around her, and suddenly disappearing in a shower of rainbow drops.

As the fountain sometimes subsides into its basin, so in Miriam there were symptoms that the frolic of her spirits would at last tire itself out.

“Ah!  Donatello,” cried she, laughing, as she stopped to take a breath; “you have an unfair advantage over me!  I am no true creature of the woods; while you are a real Faun, I do believe.  When your curls shook just now, methought I had a peep at the pointed ears.”

Donatello snapped his fingers above his head, as fauns and satyrs taught us first to do, and seemed to radiate jollity out of his whole nimble person.  Nevertheless, there was a kind of dim apprehension in his face, as if he dreaded that a moment’s pause might break the spell, and snatch away the sportive companion whom he had waited for through so many dreary months.

“Dance! dance!” cried he joyously.  “If we take breath, we shall be as we were yesterday.  There, now, is the music, just beyond this clump of trees.  Dance, Miriam, dance!”