neck, her
slender waist, her whispers, the kisses of her mouth. The scamp was
luxuriating in his own imaginings or reminiscences, much less of a
lover and far more of a rhapsodist than he suspected. As such his paean
of precocious love stirred my senses and fired my imagination, but not
in the direction of his own. For the glow which he cast upon his
affair was a borrowed one. He had dipped without knowing into the
languid glory of the evening, which like a pool of wealth lay ready to
my hand also. I gave him faint attention from the first. After he had
started my thoughts he might sing rapture after rapture of his young
and ardent sense. For me the spirit of a world not his whispered, "_A
te convien tenere altro viaggio_," and little as I knew it, in my
vague exploration of that scene of beauty, of those scarcely stirring,
stilly burning trees, of that shimmering-fronded fern, of that misty
splendour, I was hunting for the soul of it all, for the informing
spirit of it all. Harkness's erotics gave ardour to my search, but no
clew. I lost him, left him behind, and never found him again. He fell
into the Garden of Priapus, I doubt. As for me, I believed that I was
now looking upon a Dryad. I was looking certainly at a spirit
informed. A being, irradiate and quivering with life and joy of life,
stood dipt to the breast in the brake; stood so, bathing in the light;
stood so, preening herself like a pigeon on the roof-edge, and saw me
and took no heed.

She had appeared, or had been manifest to me, quite suddenly. At one
moment I saw the avenue of lit green, at another she was dipt in it. I
could describe her now, at this distance of time--a radiant young
female thing, fiercely favoured, smiling with a fierce joy, with a
gleam of fierce light in her narrowed eyes. Upon her body and face was
the hue of the sun's red beam; her hair, loose and fanned out behind
her head, was of the colour of natural silk, but diaphanous as well as
burnished, so that while the surfaces glittered like spun glass the
deeps of it were translucent and showed the fire behind. Her garment
was thin and grey, and it clung to her like a bark, seemed to grow
upon her as a creeping stone-weed grows. Harkness would have admired
the audacity of her shape, as I did; but I found nothing provocative
in it. As well might a boy have enamoured himself of a slim tree as of
that unearthly shaft of beauty.

I said that she preened herself; the word is inexact. Sh