All the more was my sense of responsibility awful:  and from day to day it seemed to intensify.  An arguing Voice never ceased to remonstrate within me, nor left me peace, and the curse of unborn hosts appeared to menace me.  To strengthen my fixity I would often overwhelm myself, and her, with muttered opprobriums, calling myself ‘convict,’ her ‘lady-bird’; asking what manner of man was I that I should dare so great a thing; and as for her, what was she to be the Mother of a world?—­a versatile butterfly with a woman’s brow!  And continually now in my fiercer moods I was meditating either my death—­or hers.

Ah, but the butterfly did not let me forget her brow!  To the south-west of Villeneuve, between the forest and the river is a well-grown gentian field, and returning from round St. Gingolph to the Chateau one day in the third month after an absence of three days, I saw, as I turned a corner in the descent of the mountain, some object floating in the air above the field.  Never was I more startled, and, above all, perplexed:  for, beside the object soaring there like a great butterfly, I could see nothing to account for it.  It was not long, however, before I came to the conclusion that she has re-invented the kite—­for she had almost certainly never seen one—­and I presently sighted her holding the string in the midfield.  Her invention resembles the kind called ‘swallow-tail’ of old.

* * * * *

But mostly it was on the lake that I saw her, for there we chiefly lived, and occasionally there were guilty approaches and rencontres, she in her boat, I in mine, both being slight clinker-built Montreux pleasure-boats, which I had spent some days in overhauling and varnishing, mine with jib, fore-and-aft mainsail, and spanker, hers rather smaller, one-masted, with an easy-running lug-sail.  It was no uncommon thing for me to sail quite to Geneva, and come back from a seven-days’ cruise with my soul filled and consoled with the lake and all its many moods of bright and darksome, serene and pensive, dolorous and despairing and tragic, at morning, at noon, at sunset, at midnight, a panorama that never for an instant ceased to unroll its transformations, I sometimes climbing the mountains as high as the goat-herd region of hoch-alpen, once sleeping there.  And once I was made very ill by a two-weeks’ horror which I had:  for she disappeared in her skiff, I being at the Chateau, and she did not come back; and while she was away there was a tempest that turned the lake into an angry ocean, and, ah my good God, she did not come.  At last, half-crazy at the vacant days of misery which went by and by, and she did not come, I set out upon a wild-goose quest, of her—­of all the hopeless things the most hopeless, for the world is great—­and I sought and did not find her; and after three days I turned back, recognising that I was mad to search the infinite, and coming near the Chateau, I saw her wave her handkerchief from the island-edge, for she divined that I had gone to seek her, and she was watching for me:  and when I took her hand, what did she say to me, the Biblical simpleton?—­’Oh you of little Faith!’ says she.  And she had adventures to lisp, with all the r’s liquefied into l’s, and I was with her all that day again.