‘How cruel they must have been!’ cries she with tremulous lip, her face at the same time reddened with indignation.

‘They were mere beastly monsters,’ said I:  ’it is nothing surprising if monsters were cruel.’

And in the short time while I said that, she was looking up with a new-born smile.

‘Some others came and set the plisoner flee!’ cries she.

‘Yes,’ said I, ‘they did, but—­’

‘That was good of them,’ says she.

‘Yes,’ said I, ‘that was all right, so far as it went.’

‘And it was a time when men had al-leady become cluel,’ says she:  ’if those who set him flee were so good when all the lest were cluel, what would they have been at a time when all the lest were kind?  They would have been just like Angels....!’

* * * * *

At this place fishing, and long rambles, were the order of the day, both for her and for me, especially fishing, though a week rarely passed which did not find me at Bouveret, St. Gingolph, Yvoire, Messery, Nyon, Ouchy, Vevay, Montreux, Geneva, or one of the two dozen villages, townlets, or towns, that crowd the shores, all very pretty places, each with its charm, and mostly I went on foot, though the railway runs right round the forty odd miles of the lake’s length.  One noon-day I was walking through the main-street of Vevay going on to the Cully-road when I had a fearful shock, for in a shop just in front of me to the right I heard a sound—­an unmistakable indication of life—­as of clattering metals shaken together.  My heart leapt into my mouth, I was conscious of becoming bloodlessly pale, and on tip-toe of exquisite caution I stole up to the open door—­peeped in—­and it was she standing on the counter of a jeweller’s shop, her back turned to me, with head bent low over a tray of jewels in her hands, which she was rummaging for something.  I went ’Hoh!’ for I could not help it, and all that day, till sunset, we were very dear friends, for I could not part from her, we walking together by vor-alpen, wood, and shore all the way to Ouchy, she just like a creature crazy that day with the bliss of living, rolling in grasses and perilous flowery declines, stamping her foot defiantly at me, arrogant queen that she is, and then running like mad for me to catch her, with laughter, abandon, carolling railleries, and the levity of the wild ass’s colt on the hills, entangling her loose-flung hair with Bacchic tendril and blossom, and drinking, in the passage through Cully, more wine, I thought, than was good:  and the flaming darts of lightning that shot and shocked me that day, and the inner secret gleams and revelations of Beauty which I had, and the pangs of white-hot honey that tortured my soul and body, and were too much for me, and made me sick, oh Heaven, what tongue could express all that deep world of things?  And at Ouchy with a backward wave of my arm I silently motioned her from me, for