ht. "He expects me to tear my
dress! He forgets, that, while thirteen years were making a statue of
her, they were making a woman of me!" And she snatched away her hand.

"I have the boat below," he said, without paying attention to the
movement. "You took the longest way round, which, you have heard, is the
shortest way home. You have never been on the lake with me." And he was
about to assist her in.

She stepped back, hesitating.

"No, no," he said. "It is very well to think of walking back, but it
must end in thinking. You have no impetus now to send you over another
half-dozen miles of wood-faring, no pique to sting, Io."

And before she could remonstrate, she was lifted in, the oars had
flashed twice, and there was deep water between herself and shore. She
was in reality too much fatigued to be vexed, and she sat silently
watching the spaces through which they glanced, and listening to the
rhythmic dip of the oars. The soft afternoon air, with its melancholy
sweetness and tinge of softer hue, hung round them; the water, brown and
warm, was dimpled with the flight of myriad insects; they wound among
the islands, a path one of them knew of old. From the shelving rocks a
wild convolvulus drooped its twisted bells across them, a sweet-brier
snatched at her hair in passing, a sudden elder-tree shot out its creamy
panicles above, they ripped up drowsy beds of folded lily-blooms.

Mr. Raleigh, suddenly lifting one oar, gave the boat a sharp curve and
sent it out on the open expanse; it seemed to him that he had no right
thus to live two lives in one. Still he wished to linger, and with now
and then a lazy movement they slipped along. He leaned one arm on the
upright oar, like a river-god, and from the store of boat-songs in his
remembrance sang now and then a strain. Marguerite sat opposite and
rested along the side, content for the moment to glide on as they were,
without a reference to the past in her thought, without a dream of the
future. Peach-bloom fell on the air, warmed all objects into mellow
tint, and reddened deep into sunset. Tinkling cow-bells, where the kine
wound out from pasture, stole faintly over the lake, reflected dyes
suffused it and spread around them sheets of splendid color, outlines
grew ever dimmer on the distant shores, a purple tone absorbed all
brilliance, the shadows fell, and, bright with angry lustre, the planet
Mars hung in the south and struck a spear, redder than rubies, down the
p