But presently a sweetly lovely face peeped from the boughs, finger on lips, the pointed chin elfish as though the cap should be a flower, a truant indeed from Fairyland. And “Silvia!” he whispered, continuing to play. She, if she it were, listened, archly smiling, a face and no more, and suddenly the leaves closed about her, and nothing there.
My breath stumbled in my throat, and I closed my eyes an instant, and when again they opened, at the further end of the pleasance, but dim in the moonlight as though in a mist of lawn and cobweb lace, I saw a lady pace from one covert to the other. And myself this time, but whether aloud I know not, said: “Madam Julia.”
For she moved imperial, but her beauty I cannot itemize, nor know now whether I saw or dreamed her lips—
“Which rubies, corals, scarlets all
For tincture wonder at,—”
nor the black splendour of her hair, and the proud dark glance she cast about her in passing, nor the splendid sweeping of her gown.
And even as she parted the boughs and Dian-like was hid among them, came another following, but stepping lightly from behind a rock whereon a tree laid leafy fingers of lucent green,—a creature of soft and flower-wafting breezes, white and sunbeam-haired, and I dare swear the ray of her eyes was blue, though see them I did not.
And Mr. Herrick, speaking as in time to his lute, seemed to say:
“Smooth Anthea for a skin
White and heaven-like crystalline,”—