“Your infatuation for the earth is so great,” she said, “mightn’t your lady-love, if she suspected it, be jealous?”

“No,” said John, “it is the earth that might be jealous, for, until I saw my lady-love, she was the undivided mistress of my heart.  For the rest, my lady-love enjoys, upon this point, my entire confidence.  I have kept nothing from her.”

“That is well,” approved Maria Dolores.  “And the sky and the sea,” still softly laughing, she asked, “have they no place in your affections?

“The sky is her tiring-maiden, and I love the sky for that,” said John.  “’Tis the sky that clothes her in her many-coloured raiment, and holds the light whereby her beauty is made manifest.  And the sea is a jewel that she bears upon her bosom,—­a magical jewel, whence, with the sky’s aid, she draws the soft rain that is her scent and her cosmetic.  ‘Fragrant the fertile earth after soft showers.’  Do you know, I could almost forgive the dour and detestable Milton everything for the sake of those seven words.  They show that in the sense of smell he had at least one attribute of humanity.”

Maria Dolores’ dark eyes were quizzical.

“The dour and detestable Milton?” she exclaimed.  “Poor Milton!  What has he done to merit such anathema?

“It isn’t what he has done, but what he was,” said John.  “That he was dour nobody will deny, dour and sour and inhuman.  Ask those unfortunate, long-suffering daughters of his, if you doubt it. They could tell you stories.  But he was worse.  He was a scribe and a Pharisee, a pragmatical, self-righteous, canting old scribe and Pharisee.  And he was worse still, and still worse yet.  He was—­what seems to me to-day the worstest thing unhung—­he was a Puritan.  Like Winthorpe’s, his blood was black and icy and vinegarish.  Like Winthorpe—­But there.  I mustn’t abuse Winthorpe any more, and I must try to forgive Milton.  Milton wrote seven good words, and Winthorpe unwittingly opened a lover’s eyes to his condition.”

He paused, and smiled down upon her, and his newly opened (and very blue) blue eyes said much.  Her eyes were dreaming on the landscape, where it shone in pearl and gold.  However, as she gave no sign of finding his conversation wearisome, he took heart, and continued.

“For when he told me how he had put his love away, never again to see her, and how at that moment she would be scrubbing floors (or taking the discipline, perhaps?) in a convent of Ursulines, suddenly, and without any action of the will on my part, there rose before me the vision of a certain woman;—­a woman I knew a little, admired immensely, very much liked, but didn’t for an instant suppose I was seriously in love with.  And involuntarily, with the vision of her before me, I asked myself whether, mutatis mutandis, I could have done as he had, and in a flash I saw that I could not,—­that not for the wealth of Ormus and of Ind could I or would I give her up, if once I had her.  So, by that token, and by the uncommon wrath with which his tale inflamed me,” John, with a rhetorical flourish, perorated, “I discovered that I loved.”  And again his eyes said much.