CHAPTER XV

He had landed on an island of the still-vexed Bermoothes.  The world lay wrecked behind him:  Raynham hung in mists, remote, a phantom to the vivid reality of this white hand which had drawn him thither away thousands of leagues in an eye-twinkle.  Hark, how Ariel sang overhead!  What splendour in the heavens!  What marvels of beauty about his enchanted brows!  And, O you wonder!  Fair Flame! by whose light the glories of being are now first seen....Radiant Miranda!  Prince Ferdinand is at your feet.

Or is it Adam, his rib taken from his side in sleep, and thus transformed, to make him behold his Paradise, and lose it?...

The youth looked on her with as glowing an eye.  It was the First Woman to him.

And she—­mankind was all Caliban to her, saving this one princely youth.

So to each other said their changing eyes in the moment they stood together; he pale, and she blushing.

She was indeed sweetly fair, and would have been held fair among rival damsels.  On a magic shore, and to a youth educated by a System, strung like an arrow drawn to the head, he, it might be guessed, could fly fast and far with her.  The soft rose in her cheeks, the clearness of her eyes, bore witness to the body’s virtue; and health and happy blood were in her bearing.  Had she stood before Sir Austin among rival damsels, that Scientific Humanist, for the consummation of his System, would have thrown her the handkerchief for his son.  The wide summer-hat, nodding over her forehead to her brows, seemed to flow with the flowing heavy curls, and those fire-threaded mellow curls, only half-curls, waves of hair call them, rippling at the ends, went like a sunny red-veined torrent down her back almost to her waist:  a glorious vision to the youth, who embraced it as a flower of beauty, and read not a feature.  There were curious features of colour in her face for him to have read.  Her brows, thick and brownish against a soft skin showing the action of the blood, met in the bend of a bow, extending to the temples long and level:  you saw that she was fashioned to peruse the sights of earth, and by the pliability of her brows that the wonderful creature used her faculty, and was not going to be a statue to the gazer.  Under the dark thick brows an arch of lashes shot out, giving a wealth of darkness to the full frank blue eyes, a mystery of meaning—­more than brain was ever meant to fathom:  richer, henceforth, than all mortal wisdom to Prince Ferdinand.  For when nature turns artist, and produces contrasts of colour on a fair face, where is the Sage, or what the Oracle, shall match the depth of its lightest look?