And how beautiful she looked in tears! Who would dive for pearls when
the pearl-fisheries of a woman's eyes are his to rifle?
Beautiful, beautiful tears, flow on--no dull, leaden rain, no mere
monotonous deluge, but a living, singing fountain, crowned with such
rainbows as hang roses and stars in the fine mist of samite waterfalls,
irradiated by gleaming shafts of lovely anger and scorn.
Like Northern Lights on autumn evenings, the maiden's eyes pierced
Narcissus through and through with many-coloured spears. There was
thunder, too; the earth shook--just a little: but soon Narcissus saw the
white dove of peace flying to him through the glancing showers. For all
her sorrow, his was the peace of confession. His little lie had been
acknowledged, his treason self-betrayed.
And it was this.
I have hinted that Narcissus, like the Catholic Church, worshipped many
saints. At this time, one of them, by a thrilling coincidence, chanced
to have her shrine at a boarding-school, some fifteen miles or so from
the mill-pond on whose banks the Miller's Daughter had drawn into her
lovely face so much of the beauty of the world. Alice Sunshine, shall we
call her, was perhaps more of a cherub than a saint; a rosy, laughing,
plump little arrangement of sunshiny pink and white flesh, with blue
eyes and golden hair. Alice was not overburdened with intellectuality,
and, like others of her sex, her heart was nothing like so soft as her
bosom.
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