Poor Wilfrid, though! I thought with a sigh; and an emotion of pity rose in me as a rebuke when I glanced at his long, awkward figure, thought of the bitter heart-ache that left him only when he slept, of his love for his little one, of the dreadful grief and dishonour that had come to him, of this apparently aimless pursuit upon the boundless surface of the ocean of a faithless woman, with the subtle distressing quality of madness in all he did, in all he thought, to make his conduct a sadder thing than can be described. I peeped round the mast for a short view of Miss Jennings. She seemed to have lighted on a chapter in the novel that was interesting. Under the droop of her long lashes her half-closed violet eyes showed with a drowsy gleam; her profile had the delicacy of a cameo, clear and tender, against the soft grey of the bulwarks past her. Deuced odd, thought I, that I should find her prettiness so fascinating; as though, forsooth, she was the first sweet girl I had ever seen! I filled another pipe and sat awhile puffing slowly, with these lines of haunting beauty running in my head: Have you seen but a bright lily grow, Before rude hands have touched it? Have you marked but the fall of the snow Before the soil hath smutch’d it? Have you felt the wool of the beaver? Or swan’s down ever? Or have smelt o’ the bud o’ the briar? Or the nard in the fire? Or have tasted the bag of the bee? O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she! The poet is also the prophet; and maybe, thought I, when old Ben Jonson planned this fairy temple of words, he had his eye on some such another little delicate goddess as that yonder. But there was to happen presently something of a kind to send sentiment flying. Bit by bit the cloud-mailed sky had drawn away down into the northward, until far past our mastheads that way it was clear blue heaven with an horizon ruling it of a sort of transparent sharpness that made you imagine you saw the atmosphere beyond through it as though it were the edge of some huge lens. The breeze was weak and the yacht’s pace very leisurely; there were hints of a calm at hand, here and there in certain long glassy swathes which wound like currents amongst the darker shadow of the wrinkling breeze upon the water; to every small roll upon the long sleepy undulation, the main boom swang in with a short rattle of canvas in the head of the sail and a flap or two forwards with the smite of the mast by the square topsail as though there were hands aloft lazily beating a carpet.