We marked the long, dark lashes
of her eyes rising and falling, now trustingly, now fearingly, before
that inscrutable countenance, as if her spirit wavered between a dream
of terror and a contentful awaking. And many imagined that, as those
dark eyes began to turn more lovingly and more longingly toward him,
the strange brilliance of his own became imbued with their softness,
while a faint auroral tinge seemed just ready to change his countenance
from marble to flesh and blood.
Thus day after day we crept along the European coast, enjoying a dream
of romance in which we could have gone on sailing contentedly forever,
our only cause of uneasiness being that, at some of the numerous ports
we touched, the magic presence on which the spell depended might go
from us, as it came to us, without ceremony or warning, and leave us
to cross the great ocean in the world of intolerable loneliness that
would settle on the ship when she was gone. There was something like
a patriotic aspiration in our desire to transplant this brightest of
Eastern blossoms to diffuse its supreme beauty and sweetness in the
West.
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