uth and lovely new beauty were dawning wild and dewy in the strange
east, and while the deep breathing of the older generations still asleep
made a more wonderful loneliness of dawn, for the hushed and happy bands
of young people holding each other's hands and watching in the
magic twilight.

To have been young in Italy in the time of Dante, in England in the time
of Shakespeare, and to have met in such a mighty morning--with danger
too to keep us grateful. Ah, we have missed those dawns; and yet I doubt
if the whole recovered beauty of Greece and Rome, or the thrilling new
fashions in romance and poetry wafted across the seas from Italy to help
make Shakespeare, ever gave young people a keener thrill of newness and
mystery than the books and pictures so eagerly discussed by the little
group that gathered over supper that night in 3 Zion Place.

To have read "The House of Life!"--to have seen the "Venus
Verticordia"! Ah! that was life! And Isabel had actually been to Mr.
G.F. Watts's studio--walked about there a whole afternoon. The young New
Zioners looked at her.

"O Theophil, we _must_ go to London," cried Jenny. She meant when they
were married.

Theophil pressed her hand tenderly, as she impulsively sought his for
sympathy, and his eyes left Isabel's face a moment to smile a true "yes"
into Jenny's.

Of course no one had eyes for anyone but Isabel that night. Was she not,
as the announcements had said, "of London," an ambassadress of beauty
from the capital of the great queen? There was really little she could
tell these clever young people, who amazed and attracted her by their
reality,--the unrealities of "intensity" and "modernity" and the rest
had, of course, already begun in London,--but she represented to them
the sparkle of the new beauty and truth they loved. She knew little
intimate anecdotes of the poets and painters they loved, piquant gossip
and brilliant _mots_; and then she was one of those women who are like
incense in a room, enriching by her very presence, exhaling mystery and
distinction, like a pomander of strange spices.

You might love her for a long time or a little, but love her you were
obliged to while you were with her, whoever else you loved too. There
was no other word for it. Even little James Whalley had conscience-pangs
as he looked at Isabel, for he had been engaged for five years; but the
poet's heart, that is, all the combustible portion of it, was already
burnt to a cinder.