“I thought it possible that—Miss Walton (?)” interrogatively this—“might not follow the Italian so easily, and I feared to seem pedantic.”
“She won’t lag far behind, I flatter myself,” I returned. “Whose translation do you quote?”
He hesitated a moment; then said carelessly:
“I have cobbled a few passages after that fashion myself.”
“It has the merit of being near the original at least,” I returned; “and that seems to me one of the chief merits a translation can possess.”
“Then,” the painter resumed, rather hastily, as if to avoid any further remark upon his verses, “you see those white things in the air above?” Here he turned to Wynnie. “Miss Walton will remember—I think she was making a drawing of the rock at the same time I was—how the seagulls, or some such birds—only two or three of them—kept flitting about the top of it?”
“I remember quite well,” answered Wynnie, with a look of appeal to me.
“Yes,” I interposed; “my daughter, in describing what she had been attempting to draw, spoke especially of the birds over the rock. For she said the white lapping of the waves looked like spirits trying to get loose, and the white birds like foam that had broken its chains, and risen in triumph into the air.”
Here Mr. Niceboots, for as yet I did not know what else to call him, looked at Wynnie almost with a start.
“How wonderfully that falls in with my fancy about the rock!” he said. “Purgatory indeed! with imprisoned souls lapping at its foot, and the free souls winging their way aloft in ether. Well, this world is a kind of purgatory anyhow—is it not, Mr. Walton?”