a
yellow East that wafted fleets of pinky cloudlets overhead. He mounted
his path to a level with inviting grassmounds where water circled,
running from scoops and cups to curves and brook-streams, and in his
fancy calling to him to hear them. To dip in them was his desire. To
roll and shiver braced by the icy flow was the spell to break that
baleful incantation of the intolerable night; so he struck across a
ridge of boulders, wreck of a landslip from the height he had hugged, to
the open space of shadowed undulations, and soon had his feet on turf.
Heights to right and to left, and between them, aloft, a sky the rosy
wheelcourse of the chariot of morn, and below, among the knolls, choice
of sheltered nooks where waters whispered of secresy to satisfy Diana
herself. They have that whisper and waving of secresy in secret scenery;
they beckon to the bath; and they conjure classic visions of the pudency
of the Goddess irate or unsighted. The semi-mythological state of mind,
built of old images and favouring haunts, was known to Dacier. The name
of Diana, playing vaguely on his consciousness, helped to it. He had no
definite thought of the mortal woman when the highest grass-roll near
the rock gave him view of a bowered source and of a pool under a chain
of cascades, bounded by polished shelves and slabs. The very spot for
him, he decided at the first peep; and at the second, with fingers
instinctively loosening his waist-coat buttons for a commencement, he
shouldered round and strolled away, though not at a rapid pace, nor far
before he halted.

That it could be no other than she, the figure he had seen standing
beside the pool, he was sure. Why had he turned? Thoughts thick and
swift as a blush in the cheeks of seventeen overcame him; and queen
of all, the thought bringing the picture of this mountain-solitude to
vindicate a woman shamefully assailed.--She who found her pleasure in
these haunts of nymph and Goddess, at the fresh cold bosom of nature,
must be clear as day. She trusted herself to the loneliness here, and to
the honour of men, from a like irreflective sincereness. She was unable
to imagine danger where her own impelling thirst was pure...

The thoughts, it will be discerned, were but flashes of a momentary
vivid sensibility. Where a woman's charm has won half the battle, her
character is an advancing standard and sings victory, let her do no more
than take a quiet morning walk before breakfast.

But why