“Ah! we who live on land wash in water, you see; but those who live in the water wash in sunshine. If you look very carefully, you will see they are all full of it.” A sweet voice spoke to him: “I am very proud of my pond, monsieur.” He acknowledged the concession with a little grave inclination of the head: “You have reason to be, Madonna”--and turned and addressed himself to the child again. CHAPTER VII. LOVE-IN-A-MIST The next day opened wild and wet. In the night a west wind had driven in from the sea, and drawn a rushing curtain over the rainbow summer of the gardens. Isabella, for no reason that she could define, felt strangely restless and uneasy. She was not wont to weather moods, or to feel impatience over enforced confinements to her rooms. Now, quite inexplicably, that prospect seemed insufferable; something in her cried out for space and freedom; the call of the wind and the rain reached to her for the first time, as though an unsuspected door in her heart had suddenly blown open. As sin or fever dreams of water, eternally of a cool and cleansing stream, so her soul turned with longing to the cold purification of the storm. And presently, unable to resist, she put on cloak and hood, and slipped out undetected into the gardens. The rain came in her face and blew it as pink as a flower; the wind snatched at her hair, and caught and played with a fluttering wisp of it. As she went on, a spirit of exhilaration rose to possess her, quite alone and at liberty as she was. State and observance seemed unreal things; there was not a soul abroad to remind her of them; she and nature were in one confidence together, as if, like old companions long mistily estranged, they were as mistily reunited. Involuntarily, it seemed, her steps took her towards the spot associated with an incident of yesterday. There was a woven arbour near by the lily-pond, and her thoughts settled there, as in a hermitage sweet for meditation. She would like to sit and watch the drops plash in the water; she pictured the lilies drunk to satiety on the element they loved, and expanding their gorged cups till they could stretch no further; she foretasted the wet solitude of it all as a refuge from strange unrecognised emotions, a little distressful yet a little sweet, which seemed suddenly to have overtaken her, flowing from some primeval source. The flowering borders, as she passed them, were all gravel-splashed and sodden. She saw an early blossom that she loved, a little blue starry thing of the fennel tribe, and stopped to shake its heavy-hanging sprays free of water, and to pluck one and put it in her bosom. Then she went on.