rn
the passion. Young, brilliant, eloquent, enamoured, and Athenian, he was
to her as the incarnation of the poetry of her father's land. They were
not like creatures of a world in which strife and sorrow are the
elements; they were like things to be seen only in the holiday of
nature, so glorious and so fresh were their youth, their beauty, and
their love. They seemed out of place in the harsh and every-day earth;
they belonged of right to the Saturnian age, and the dreams of demigod
and nymph. It was as if the poetry of life gathered and fed itself in
them, and in their hearts were concentrated the last rays of the sun of
Delos and of Greece.

But if Ione was independent in her choice of life, so was her modest
pride proportionably vigilant and easily alarmed. The falsehood of the
Egyptian was invented by a deep knowledge of her nature. The story of
coarseness, of indelicacy, in Glaucus, stung her to the quick. She felt
it a reproach upon her character and her career, a punishment above all
to her love; she felt, for the first time, how suddenly she had yielded
to that love; she blushed with shame at a weakness, the extent of which
she was startled to perceive: she imagined it was that weakness which
had incurred the contempt of Glaucus; she endured the bitterest curse of
noble natures--humiliation! Yet her love, perhaps, was no less alarmed
than her pride. If one moment she murmured reproaches upon Glaucus--if
one moment she renounced, she almost hated him--at the next she burst
into passionate tears, her heart yielded to its softness, and she said
in the bitterness of anguish, 'He despises me--he does not love me.'

From the hour the Egyptian had left her she had retired to her most
secluded chamber, she had shut out her handmaids, she had denied herself
to the crowds that besieged her door. Glaucus was excluded with the
rest; he wondered, but he guessed not why! He never attributed to his
Ione--his queen--his goddess--that woman--like caprice of which the
love-poets of Italy so unceasingly complain. He imagined her, in the
majesty of her candour, above all the arts that torture. He was
troubled, but his hopes were not dimmed, for he knew already that he
loved and was beloved; what more could he desire as an amulet against
fear?

At deepest night, then, when the streets were hushed, and the high moon
only beheld his devotions, he stole to that temple of his heart--her
home; and wooed her after the bea