at the
ripe moment, and he fell passionately in love with her. She was only
fifteen, and did not understand this adoration, unspoken and unexpressed
except by intensified shyness; for he was a very shy boy in the
drawing-room, though brimming over with life and fun among his
schoolfellows. His mother's ideals of education did not include French
gallantry; he felt at a loss before these Paris-bred, Paris-dressed
young ladies, and encumbered by the very strength of his new-found
passion.

And yet he possessed advantages, if he had known how to use them. He was
tall and active, light and lithe in gesture, not a clumsy hobbledehoy.
He had the face that caught the eye, in Rome a few years later, of
Keats' Severn, no mean judge, surely, of faces and poet's faces. He was
undeniably clever; he knew all about minerals and mountains; he was
quite an artist, and a printed poet. But these things weigh little with
a girl of fifteen who wants to be amused; and so she only laughed at
John.

He tried to amuse her, but he tried too seriously. He wrote a story to
read her, "Leoni, a Legend of Italy," for of course she understood
enough English to be read to, no doubt to be wooed in, seeing her mother
was English. The story was of brigands and true lovers, the thing that
was popular in the romantic period. The costumery and mannerisms of the
little romance are out of date now, and seem ridiculous, though Mr.
Pringle and the public were pleased with it then, when it was printed in
"Friendship's Offering." But the girl of fifteen only laughed the more.

When they left, he had no interest in his tour-book; even the mountains,
for the time, had lost their power, and all his plans of great works
were dropped for a new style of verse--the love-poems of 1836.

His father, from whom he kept nothing, approved the verses, and did not
disapprove his views on the young lady. Indeed, it is quite plain, from
the correspondence of the two gentlemen, that Mr. Domecq intended his
friend and partner's son to become his own son-in-law. He had the
greatest respect for the Ruskins, and every reason for desiring to link
their fortunes still more closely with those of his own family. But to
Mrs. Ruskin, with her religious feelings, it was intolerable,
unbelievable, that the son whom she had brought up in the nurture and
admonition of the strictest Protestantism should fix his heart on an
alien in race and creed. The wonder is that their relations were not