en stood there, absorbed in her
contemplation, and murmuring: 'I had never, never seen you before.'

He had certainly grown taller. Clothed in a loose garment, he stood
erect, still somewhat slender, with finely moulded limbs, square chest,
and rounded shoulders. His head, slightly thrown back, was poised upon
a flexible and snowy neck, rimmed with brown behind. Health and strength
and power were on his face. He did not smile, his expression was that of
repose, with grave and tender mouth, firm cheeks, large nose, and grey,
clear, commanding eyes. The long locks that thickly covered his head
fell upon his shoulders in jetty curls; while a slender growth of hair,
through which gleamed his white skin, curled upon his upper lip and
chin.

'Oh! how handsome, how handsome you are!' lingeringly repeated Albine,
crouching at his feet and gazing up at him with loving eyes. 'But why
are you sulking with me? Why don't you speak to me?'

Still he stood there and made no answer. His eyes were far away; he
never even saw that child at his feet. He spoke to himself in the
sunlight, and said: 'How good the light is!'

That utterance sounded like a vibration of the sunlight itself. It fell
amid the silence in the faintest of whispers like a musical sigh, a
quiver of warmth and of life. For several days Albine had never heard
his voice, and now, like himself, it had altered. It seemed to her to
course through the park more sweetly than the melody of birds, more
imperiously than the wind that bends the boughs. It reigned, it ruled.
The whole garden heard it, though it had been but a faint and passing
breath, and the whole garden was thrilled with the joyousness it
brought.

'Speak to me,' implored Albine. 'You have never spoken to me like that.
When you were upstairs in your room, when you were not dumb, you talked
the silly prattle of a child. How is it I no longer know your voice?
Just now I thought it had come down from the trees, that it reached me
from every part of the garden, that it was one of those deep sighs that
used to worry me at night before you came. Listen, everything is keeping
silence to hear you speak again.'

But still he failed to recognise her presence. Tenderer grew her tones.
'No, don't speak if it tires you. Sit down beside me, and we will
remain here on the grass till the sun wanes. And look, I have found two
strawberries. Such trouble I had too! The birds eat up everything. One's
for you, both if you lik