Then dawning out of the dreamland of her past, appeared the image of Lenorme. Pure pleasure, glorious delight, such as she now felt, could not long possess her mind, without raising in its charmed circle the vision of the only man except her father whom she had ever--something like loved. Her behaviour to him had not yet roused in her shame or sorrow or sense of wrong. She had driven him from her; she was ashamed of her relation to him; she had caused him bitter suffering; she had all but promised to marry another man; yet she had not the slightest wish for that man’s company there and then: with no one of her acquaintance but Lenorme could she have shared this conscious splendour of life. “Would to God he had been born a gentleman instead of a painter!” she said to herself when her imagination had brought him from the past, and set him in the midst of the present. “Rank,” she said, “I am above caring about. In that he might be ever so far my inferior, and welcome, if only he had been of a good family, a gentleman born!” She was generosity, magnanimity itself in her own eyes! Yet he was of far better family than she knew, for she had never taken the trouble to inquire into his history. And now she was so much easier in her mind since she had so cruelly broken with him, that she felt positively virtuous because she had done it, and he was not at that moment by her side. And yet if he had that moment stepped from behind the main-sail, she would in all probability have thrown herself into his arms. The day passed on: Florimel grew tired and went to sleep; woke and had her dinner; took a volume of the “Arabian Nights,” and read herself again to sleep; woke again; went on deck; saw the sun growing weary in the west. And still the unwearied wind blew, and still the Psyche danced on, as unwearied as the wind. The sun-set was rather an assumption than a decease, a reception of him out of their sight into an eternity of gold and crimson; and when he was gone, and the gorgeous bliss had withered into a dove-hued grief, then the cool, soft twilight, thoughtful of the past and its love, crept out of the western caves over the breast of the water, and filled the dome and made of itself a great lens royal, through which the stars and their motions were visible; and the ghost of Aurora with both hands lifted her shroud above her head and made a dawn for the moon on the verge of the watery horizon-- a dawn as of the past, the hour of inverted hope. Not a word all day had been uttered between Malcolm and his mistress: when the moon appeared, with the waves sweeping up against her face, he approached Florimel where she sat in the stern. Davy was steering. “Will your ladyship come forward and see how the Psyche goes?” he said. “At the stern, you can see only the passive part of her motion. It is quite another thing to see the will of her at work in the bows.”