ape trembled over the brink. Richard sprang
from his boat into the water. Pressing a hand beneath her foot, which she
had thrust against the crumbling wet sides of the bank to save herself,
he enabled her to recover her balance, and gain safe earth, whither he
followed her.

CHAPTER XV

He had landed on an island of the still-vexed Bermoothes. The world lay
wrecked behind him: Raynham hung in mists, remote, a phantom to the vivid
reality of this white hand which had drawn him thither away thousands of
leagues in an eye-twinkle. Hark, how Ariel sang overhead! What splendour
in the heavens! What marvels of beauty about his enchanted brows! And, O
you wonder! Fair Flame! by whose light the glories of being are now first
seen....Radiant Miranda! Prince Ferdinand is at your feet.

Or is it Adam, his rib taken from his side in sleep, and thus
transformed, to make him behold his Paradise, and lose it?...

The youth looked on her with as glowing an eye. It was the First Woman to
him.

And she--mankind was all Caliban to her, saving this one princely youth.

So to each other said their changing eyes in the moment they stood
together; he pale, and she blushing.

She was indeed sweetly fair, and would have been held fair among rival
damsels. On a magic shore, and to a youth educated by a System, strung
like an arrow drawn to the head, he, it might be guessed, could fly fast
and far with her. The soft rose in her cheeks, the clearness of her eyes,
bore witness to the body's virtue; and health and happy blood were in her
bearing. Had she stood before Sir Austin among rival damsels, that
Scientific Humanist, for the consummation of his System, would have
thrown her the handkerchief for his son. The wide summer-hat, nodding
over her forehead to her brows, seemed to flow with the flowing heavy
curls, and those fire-threaded mellow curls, only half-curls, waves of
hair call them, rippling at the ends, went like a sunny red-veined
torrent down her back almost to her waist: a glorious vision to the
youth, who embraced it as a flower of beauty, and read not a feature.
There were curious features of colour in her face for him to have read.
Her brows, thick and brownish against a soft skin showing the action of
the blood, met in the bend of a bow, extending to the temples long and
level: you saw that she was fashioned to peruse the sights of earth, and
by the pliability of her brows that the wonderful creature used her
faculty,