‘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!

They passed the hazel-bank, and rounded the castlecrag, washed by the brook and, beneath the advancing moon, standing in a ring of brawling silver.  The youth with his fervid eyes marked the old weather-stains and scars of long defiance coming into colour.  That mystery of wickedness which the towers had worn in the dusk, was dissolved, and he endured no more the almost abashed sensation of competing littleness that made him think there was nought to do, save die, combating single-handed such massive power.  The moon shone calmly superior, like the prowess of maiden knights; and now the harsh frown of the walls struck resolution to his spirit, and nerved him with hate and the contempt true courage feels when matched against fraud and villany.

On a fallen block of slate, cushioned with rich brown moss and rusted weather-stains, the Water-Lady sat, and pointed to Farina the path of the moon toward the round tower.  She did not speak, and if his lips parted, put her cold finger across them.  Then she began to hum a soft sweet monotony of song, vague and careless, very witching to hear.  Farina caught no words, nor whether the song was of days in dust or in flower, but his mind bloomed with legends and sad splendours of story, while she sang on the slate-block under sprinkled shadows by the water.