Still thick and fast fell the fleeces. Blanda had cast a mantle of wool over the prostrate girl, but out of heaven descended a pall, whiter than fuller on earth can bleach, and buried the woolen cloak and the extended quivering limbs. Beside her, in the snow, knelt Æmilius. He held her hand in one of [pg 286]his. She looked him in the face and smiled. Then she said: “Give to Blanda her liberty.”
He could not speak. He signed that it should be so.
Then she said: “I have prayed for thee—on the rack, in the fire—that the light may shine into thy heart.”
She closed her eyes.
Still he held her hand, and with the other gently brushed away the snowflakes as they fell on her pure face. Oh wondrous face! Face above the dream of the highest Greek artist!
Thus passed an hour—thus a second.
Then suddenly the clouds parted, and the sun poured down a flood of glory over the dazzling white oval field, in the midst of which lay a heap of whiteness, and on a face as of alabaster, inanimate, and on a kneeling, weeping man, still with reverent finger sweeping away the last snowflakes from eyelash, cheek and hair, and who felt as if he could thus look, and kneel, and weep for ever.[12]