Milton?" she exclaimed. "Poor Milton! What has
he done to merit such anathema?

"It isn't what he has done, but what he was," said John. "That he was
dour nobody will deny, dour and sour and inhuman. Ask those unfortunate,
long-suffering daughters of his, if you doubt it. _They_ could tell you
stories. But he was worse. He was a scribe and a Pharisee, a
pragmatical, self-righteous, canting old scribe and Pharisee. And he was
worse still, and still worse yet. He was--what seems to me to-day the
worstest thing unhung--he was a Puritan. Like Winthorpe's, his blood was
black and icy and vinegarish. Like Winthorpe--But there. I mustn't
abuse Winthorpe any more, and I must try to forgive Milton. Milton wrote
seven good words, and Winthorpe unwittingly opened a lover's eyes to his
condition."

He paused, and smiled down upon her, and his newly opened (and very
blue) blue eyes said much. Her eyes were dreaming on the landscape,
where it shone in pearl and gold. However, as she gave no sign of
finding his conversation wearisome, he took heart, and continued.

"For when he told me how he had put his love away, never again to see
her, and how at that moment she would be scrubbing floors (or taking the
discipline, perhaps?) in a convent of Ursulines, suddenly, and without
any action of the will on my part, there rose before me the vision of a
certain woman;--a woman I knew a little, admired immensely, very much
liked, but didn't for an instant suppose I was seriously in love with.
And involuntarily, with the vision of her before me, I asked myself
whether, _mutatis mutandis_, I could have done as he had, and in a flash
I saw that I could not,--that not for the wealth of Ormus and of Ind
could I or would I give her up, if once I had her. So, by that token,
and by the uncommon wrath with which his tale inflamed me," John, with a
rhetorical flourish, perorated, "I discovered that I loved." And again
his eyes said much.

Hers were still on the prospect.

"Yet if you only know her a little, how can you love her?" she asked, in
a musing voice.

"Did I say I only know her a little?" asked John. "I know her a great
deal. I know her through and through. I know that she is pure gold, pure
crystal; that she is made of all music, all light, all sweetness, and of
all shadow and silence and mystery too, as women should be. I know that
earth holds naught above her. I do not care to employ superlatives, so,
to put it in the form of an under