he depths of his, and then downcast; for through her
eyes her soul is naked to him.

"Lucy! my bride! my life!"

The night-jar spins his dark monotony on the branch of the pine. The
soft beam travels round them, and listens to their hearts. Their lips
are locked.

Pipe no more, Love, for a time! Pipe as you will you cannot express
their first kiss; nothing of its sweetness, and of the sacredness of
it nothing. St. Cecilia up aloft, before the silver organ-pipes of
Paradise, pressing fingers upon all the notes of which Love is but one,
from her you may hear it.

So Love is silent. Out in the world there, on the skirts of the
woodland, the self-satisfied sheep-boy delivers a last complacent
squint down the length of his penny-whistle, and, with a flourish
correspondingly awry, he also marches into silence, hailed by supper.
The woods are still. There is heard but the night-jar spinning on the
pine-branch, circled by moonlight.

CHAPTER XX

Enchanted Islands have not yet rooted out their old brood of dragons.
Wherever there is romance, these monsters come by inimical attraction.
Because the heavens are certainly propitious to true lovers, the beasts
of the abysses are banded to destroy them, stimulated by innumerable
sad victories; and every love-tale is an Epic Par of the upper and lower
powers. I wish good fairies were a little more active. They seem to be
cajoled into security by the happiness of their favourites; whereas the
wicked are always alert, and circumspect. They let the little ones shut
their eyes to fancy they are not seen, and then commence.

These appointments and meetings, involving a start from the dinner-table
at the hour of contemplative digestion and prime claret; the hour when
the wise youth Adrian delighted to talk at his ease--to recline in
dreamy consciousness that a work of good was going on inside him;
these abstractions from his studies, excesses of gaiety, and glumness,
heavings of the chest, and other odd signs, but mainly the disgusting
behaviour of his pupil at the dinner-table, taught Adrian to understand,
though the young gentleman was clever in excuses, that he had somehow
learnt there was another half to the divided Apple of Creation, and had
embarked upon the great voyage of discovery of the difference between
the two halves. With his usual coolness Adrian debated whether he might
be in the observatory or the practical stage of the voyage. For himself,
as a man and a phil