beautiful--always sending out such colours and such scents--red scent,
and white scent, and yellow scent--for the other creatures! The one
that was invisible and everywhere, took such a quantity of their
scents, and carried it away! yet they did not seem to mind. It was
their talk, to show they were alive, and not painted like those on the
walls of her rooms, and on the carpets.

She wandered along down the garden until she reached the river. Unable
then to get any further--for she was a little afraid, and justly, of
the swift watery serpent--she dropped on the grassy bank, dipped her
feet in the water, and felt it running and pushing against them. For a
long time she sat thus, and her bliss seemed complete, as she gazed at
the river, and watched the broken picture of the great lamp overhead,
moving up one side of the roof, to go down the other.




CHAPTER XIII.

SOMETHING QUITE NEW.


A beautiful moth brushed across the great blue eyes of Nycteris. She
sprang to her feet to follow it--not in the spirit of the hunter, but
of the lover. Her heart--like every heart, if only its fallen sides
were cleared away--was an inexhaustible fountain of love: she loved
everything she saw. But as she followed the moth, she caught sight of
something lying on the bank of the river, and not yet having learned
to be afraid of anything, ran straight to see what it was. Reaching