“Lucy! and did you pray that we might meet?”

“I did!”

Young as when she looked upon the lovers in Paradise, the fair Immortal journeys onward.  Fronting her, it is not night but veiled day.  Full half the sky is flushed.  Not darkness, not day, but the nuptials of the two.

“My own! my own for ever!  You are pledged to me?  Whisper!”

He hears the delicious music.

“And you are mine?”

A soft beam travels to the fern-covert under the pinewood where they sit, and for answer he has her eyes turned to him an instant, timidly fluttering over the depths of his, and then downcast; for through her eyes her soul is naked to him.

“Lucy! my bride! my life!”

The night-jar spins his dark monotony on the branch of the pine.  The soft beam travels round them, and listens to their hearts.  Their lips are locked.

Pipe no more, Love, for a time!  Pipe as you will you cannot express their first kiss; nothing of its sweetness, and of the sacredness of it nothing.  St. Cecilia up aloft, before the silver organ-pipes of Paradise, pressing fingers upon all the notes of which Love is but one, from her you may hear it.

So Love is silent.  Out in the world there, on the skirts of the woodland, the self-satisfied sheep-boy delivers a last complacent squint down the length of his penny-whistle, and, with a flourish correspondingly awry, he also marches into silence, hailed by supper.  The woods are still.  There is heard but the night-jar spinning on the pine-branch, circled by moonlight.

CHAPTER XX

Enchanted Islands have not yet rooted out their old brood of dragons.  Wherever there is romance, these monsters come by inimical attraction.  Because the heavens are certainly propitious to true lovers, the beasts of the abysses are banded to destroy them, stimulated by innumerable sad victories; and every love-tale is an Epic Par of the upper and lower powers.  I wish good fairies were a little more active.  They seem to be cajoled into security by the happiness of their favourites; whereas the wicked are always alert, and circumspect.  They let the little ones shut their eyes to fancy they are not seen, and then commence.

These appointments and meetings, involving a start from the dinner-table at the hour of contemplative digestion and prime claret; the hour when the wise youth Adrian delighted to talk at his ease—­to recline in dreamy consciousness that a work of good was going on inside him; these abstractions from his studies, excesses of gaiety, and glumness, heavings of the chest, and other odd signs, but mainly the disgusting behaviour of his pupil at the dinner-table, taught Adrian to understand, though the young gentleman was clever in excuses, that he had somehow learnt there was another half to the divided Apple of Creation, and had embarked upon the great voyage of discovery