It was a wood
of beeches and limes, with here and there a light silver-stemmed
birch--just the sort of wood most haunted by the nymphs: you see their
white sunlit limbs gleaming athwart the boughs, or peeping from behind
the smooth-sweeping outline of a tall lime; you hear their soft liquid
laughter--but if you look with a too curious sacrilegious eye, they
vanish behind the silvery beeches, they make you believe that their
voice was only a running brooklet, perhaps they metamorphose themselves
into a tawny squirrel that scampers away and mocks you from the topmost
bough. It was not a grove with measured grass or rolled gravel for you
to tread upon, but with narrow, hollow-shaped, earthy paths, edged with
faint dashes of delicate moss--paths which look as if they were made
by the free will of the trees and underwood, moving reverently aside to
look at the tall queen of the white-footed nymphs.
It was along the broadest of these paths that Arthur Donnithorne passed,
under an avenue of limes and beeches. It was a still afternoon--the
golden light was lingering languidly among the upper boughs, only
glancing down here and there on the purple pathway and its edge of
faintly sprinkled moss: an afternoon in which destiny disguises her cold
awful face behind a hazy radiant veil, encloses us in warm downy
wings, and poisons us with violet-scented breath.
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