But then his heart went out to almost everything in this wonder island of the Sporades group, which he had purchased for a mere song from the Turkish Government. A mere song indeed! It filled him with awe to think of becoming the possessor of so much pure loveliness, when he had spent hundreds--nay! thousands of times as much--in trying to make one house fit for children to die in!
Even as it stood, it was an earthly paradise. When he had finished spending a little more money and a good deal more leisure on it, when the white marble ruins on it were restored, when books and music came to its pleasant pavilions, above all when Love came to take up her abode there, it would be a veritable fragment of the heavenly Jerusalem chipped off and dropped here by chance in the still, deep blue sea.
Yes! it was extraordinarily beautiful! It satisfied the soul!
Straight away from the water's edge, save where here and there a coral-sanded creek broke the clear cut of the cliff, the land rose steadily, cleft by sharp ravines, to a central peak, not high, yet high enough to hold, on this early morning in February, a dusting of frosty dew upon its summit, which shone evanescently, like snow, then disappeared before the rising sunbeams as they fell.
The ilex woods were already green and bronze in their new, soft, yet spike-set shoots; the olives grew sturdily amongst the burnished leafage of the wild lemon and the wild orange, and down the ravines, where trickled scantily among the stones tiny streams of water, the oleanders were already preparing their blaze of red and white.
And the flowers! Ye gods! what flowers! It would take Aura a lifetime simply to find out their names! Every thicket showed them aburst with coming blossom; and, the open spaces, even thus early, were carpeted with fritillaries and narcissus.
And the birds! A pair of tiny sun-birds flitted past him twittering, playful, a flash of scarlet wheeling wings and ruby throats. On the rock yonder, an emerald and sapphire kingfisher sat silent, looking with large, piercing eyes out to sea.
So indeed might Halcyon have sat looking for her Ceyx! And as he watched the bird, immobile, mournful, the full beauty of the far-way Greek legend struck Ned Blackborough's mind with new force.
Ay! So must all those who love the Something they know not what, which they find, or seem to find, in some woman's beauty, some man's strength--so must they watch and wait, flitting ever over the waves of life seeking the Beloved. Not even the halcyon days when Zeus gives the wisdom of calm, could end that ceaseless quest. Aura had been right. Behind love was the "Something better" which he had felt, in which both he and she had been lost, as they had sat together, hand in hand, listening to the robin as it sang on the holly-tree.
The sun-birds flitted past again less playfully, more lovingly, and Ned Blackborough started up remembering that it was the 14th of February--St. Valentine's day! Naturally the birds were pairing. Naturally there was spring in the air. Naturally his blood seemed to race through his veins; he also could have made love!