‘With the great sea sounding near it!’

Alvan drew closer to her.

’I look into your eyes and perceive that one may listen to you and speak to you.  Heart to heart, then!  Yes, a sea to lull you, a sea to win you —­temperately, let us hope; by storm, if need be.  My prize is found!  The good friend who did the part of Iris for us came bounding to me:  “I have discovered the wife for you, Alvan.”  I had previously heard of her from another as having touched the islet of Capri.  “But,” said Kollin, “she is a gold-crested serpent—­slippery!” Is she?  That only tells me of a little more to be mastered.  I feel my future now.  Hitherto it has been a land without sunlight.  Do you know how the look of sunlight on a land calms one?  It signifies to the eye possession and repose, the end gained—­not the end to labour, just heaven! but peace to the heart’s craving, which is the renewal of strength for work, the fresh dip in the waters of life.  Conjure up your vision of Italy.  Remember the meaning of Italian light and colour:  the clearness, the luminous fulness, the thoughtful shadows.  Mountain and wooded headland are solid, deep to the eye, spirit-speaking to the mind.  They throb.  You carve shapes of Gods out of that sky, the sea, those peaks.  They live with you.  How they satiate the vacant soul by influx, and draw forth the troubled from its prickly nest!—­Well, and you are my sunlighted land.  And you will have to be fought for.  And I see not the less repose in the prospect!  Part of you may be shifty-sand.  The sands are famous for their golden shining—­as you shine.  Well, then, we must make the quicksands concrete.  I have a perfect faith in you, and in the winning of you.  Clearly you will have to be fought for.  I should imagine it a tough battle to come.  But as I doubt neither you nor myself, I see beyond it.—­We use phrases in common, and aphorisms, it appears.  Why? but that our minds act in unison.  What if I were to make a comparison of you with Paris?—­the city of Paris, Lutetia.’

‘Could you make it good?’ said Clotilde.

He laughed and postponed it for a series of skimming discussions, like swallow-flights from the nest beneath the eaves to the surface of the stream, perpetually reverting to her, and provoking spirited replies, leading her to fly with him in expectation of a crowning compliment that must be singular and was evidently gathering confirmation in his mind from the touchings and probings of her character on these flights.

She was like a lady danced off her sense of fixity, to whom the appearance of her whirling figure in the mirror is both wonderful and reassuring; and she liked to be discussed, to be compared to anything, for the sake of being the subject, so as to be sure it was she that listened to a man who was a stranger, claiming her for his own; sure it was she that by not breaking from him implied consent, she that went speeding in