orning's; and she had not a spot of seeresy; all her nature
flew and bloomed; she was bird, flower, flowing river, a quivering
sensibility unweighted, enshrouded. Desires and hopes would surely have
weighted and shrouded her. She had none, save for the upper air, the
eyes of the mountain.

Which was the dream--her past life or this ethereal existence? But
this ran spontaneously, and the other had often been stimulated--her
vivaciousness on the Nile-boat, for a recent example. She had not a
doubt that her past life was the dream, or deception: and for the reason
that now she was compassionate, large of heart toward all beneath her.
Let them but leave her free, they were forgiven, even to prayers for
their well-being! The plural number in the case was an involuntary
multiplying of the single, coming of her incapacity during this
elevation and rapture of the senses to think distinctly of that One who
had discoloured her opening life. Freedom to breathe, gaze, climb,
grow with the grasses, fly with the clouds, to muse, to sing, to be
an unclaimed self, dispersed upon earth, air, sky, to find a keener
transfigured self in that radiation--she craved no more.

Bear in mind her beauty, her charm of tongue, her present state of white
simplicity in fervour: was there ever so perilous a woman for the most
guarded and clearest-eyed of young men to meet at early morn upon a
mountain side?

CHAPTER XVI. TREATS OF A MIDNIGHT BELL, AND OF A SCENE OF EARLY MORNING

On a round of the mountains rising from Osteno, South eastward of
Lugano, the Esquart party rose from the natural grotto and headed their
carriages up and down the defiles, halting for a night at Rovio,
a little village below the Generoso, lively with waterfalls and
watercourses; and they fell so in love with the place, that after
roaming along the flowery borderways by moonlight, they resolved to rest
there two or three days and try some easy ascents. In the diurnal course
of nature, being pleasantly tired, they had the avowed intention of
sleeping there; so they went early to their beds, and carelessly wished
one another good-night, none of them supposing slumber to be anywhere
one of the warlike arts, a paradoxical thing you must battle for and can
only win at last when utterly beaten. Hard by their inn, close enough
for a priestly homily to have been audible, stood a church campanile,
wherein hung a Bell, not ostensibly communicating with the demons of the
pit;