It was a village of no importance, save for the road that close by
forded the Guadalete, which was a pale icy mountain stream, snow-broth,
as Shakespeare said. (Now what had he said to excite her so? Modesty and
a sense of office discipline were restraining some eager cry of her
mind, like white hands holding birds resolved on flight.) One passed
through it on a ride that Mr. Philip must certainly take when he went to
Spain. Yaverland himself had done it last February. He receded into a
dream of that springtime, yet kept his consciousness of the girl's rapt
attention, as one may clasp the warm hand of a friend while one thinks
deeply, and he sent his voice out to Mr. Philip as into a void,
describing how he had gone to Seville one saint's day and how the narrow
decaying streets, choked with loveliness like stagnant ditches filled
with a fair weed, had entertained him. For a time he had sat in the
Moorish courts of the Alcazar; he had visited the House of Pontius
Pilate and had watched through the carven windows the two stone women
that pray for ever among the flowers in the courtyard; he had lingered
by the market-stalls observing their exquisite, unprofitable trade. He
was telling not half the beauty that he recollected, save in a phrase
that he now and then dropped to the girl's manifest appetite for such
things, and he took a malign pleasure in painting, so to speak,
advertisement matter across the sky of his landscapes so that Mr. Philip
could swallow them as being of potential commercial value and not mere
foolish sensuous enjoyment. "There's so little real wealth in the
country that they have to buy and sell mere pretty things for God knows
what fraction of a farthing. On the stalls where you'd have cheap clocks
and crockery and Austrian glass, they had stacks of violets and
carnations--_violetas y claveles_...." Then a chill and a dimness passed
over the bright spectacle and a sunset flamed up half across the sky as
though light had been driven out of the gates by the sword and had