“A sweeter persuasion rests upon thy lips.”
“Hist! I hear the flowers moving.”
“It is the murmur of the sea, far distant, calling.”
“What sayest it?”
“Love.”
The maid, half-yielding, half-refusing, by doubt and trust in turn possessed, bent over the fair-eyed beast recumbent at her side, and stroked its smoking flanks, and played with the garlands now displaced and torn, and sought with pliant fingers to renew a labor which might conceal the passion new-born, struggling in her breast.
“Thou shall forsake thy land and dwell with me; and here, along these paths, and by the waters whose words thou hearest, and with the light, and with darkness, we will all the pleasures prove which God to our first parents gave when, in Paradise, resting, he declared all things good.”
“And Cain?”
“Sweet cousin?”
“It was my father’s shadow that overcame us, and I fled, fearing his anger, from the music of thy tongue.”