He paced the meadows, and patted the three pasturing steeds.  Involuntarily his sight grew on the moon.  She went so slowly.  She seemed not to move at all.  A little wing of vapour flew toward her; it whitened, passed, and the moon was slower than before.  Oh! were the heavens delaying their march to look on this iniquity?  Again and again he cried, ‘Patience, it is not time!’ He flung himself on the grass.  The next moment he climbed the heights, and was peering at the mass of gloom that fronted the sky.  It reared such a mailed head of menace, that his heart was seized with a quivering, as though it had been struck.  Behind lay scattered some small faint-winkling stars on sapphire fields, and a stain of yellow light was in a breach of one wall.

He descended.  What was the Goshawk doing?  Was he betrayed?  It was surely now time?  No; the moon had not yet smitten the face of the castle.  He made his way through the hazel-bank among flitting nightmoths, and glanced up to measure the moon’s distance.  As he did so, a first touch of silver fell on the hoary flint.

‘Oh, young bird of heaven in that Devil’s clutch!’

Sounds like the baying of boar-hounds alarmed him.  They whined into silence.

He fell back.  The meadow breathed peace, and more and more the nightingales volumed their notes.  As in a charmed circle of palpitating song, he succumbed to languor.  The brook rolled beside him fresh as an infant, toying with the moonlight.  He leaned over it, and thrice waywardly dipped his hand in the clear translucence.

Was it his own face imaged there?

Farina bent close above an eddy of the water.  It whirled with a strange tumult, breaking into lines and lights a face not his own, nor the moon’s; nor was it a reflection.  The agitation increased.  Now a wreath of bubbles crowned the pool, and a pure water-lily, but larger, ascended wavering.

He started aside; and under him a bright head, garlanded with gemmed roses, appeared.  No fairer figure of woman had Farina seen.  Her visage had the lustrous white of moonlight, and all her shape undulated in a dress of flashing silver-white, wonderful to see.  The Lady of the Water smiled on him, and ran over with ripples and dimples of limpid beauty.  Then, as he retreated on the meadow grass, she swam toward him, and taking his hand, pressed it to her.  After her touch the youth no longer feared.  She curved her finger, and beckoned him on.  All that she did was done flowingly.  The youth was a shadow in her silver track as she passed like a harmless wave over the closed crocuses; but the crocuses shivered and swelled their throats of streaked purple and argent as at delicious rare sips of a wine.  Breath of violet, and ladysmock, and valley-lily, mingled and fluttered about her.  Farina was as a man working the day’s intent in a dream.  He could see the heart in her translucent, hanging like a cold dingy ruby.  By the purity of his nature he felt that such a presence must have come but to help.  It might be Margarita’s guardian fairy!