An odd small face, peering from the green, greeted her. Then both disappeared, and only the swirling bobbing lily remained to tell of the picture. A voice spoke at Tiretta’s side. The archduke had alighted. “Fantastic, lovely--a spirit of the beautiful water. How the sun and shade fought for her face, her bosom! Tiretta.” “Sir.” “I would not willingly forget that vision. See, take this ring” (he pulled a green intaglio from his finger)--“carry it to her; say that the Count of Falckenstein presents his duty to the nixie of the pool, and begs her to accept of this gage in token of his thraldom. No delay--not a moment--or you will be too late.” Tiretta, in his jack-boots, splashed back across the ford. He found the wicket unfastened, and entered; a short hedgy lane carried him to the chestnut trees and the patch of sward over against the islet. He half expected to find the apparition vanished beyond recall--a dream, an hallucination. But there she stood withdrawn into the green, a flushed and laughing reality. Her sodden skirts clung about her; they were hemmed with mud as if, a lily herself, she had been uprooted from the water; her raised hands sought to restore symmetry to her disordered locks; there was a gleam of snowy teeth, a flush of translucent rose--he thought he had never seen a picture so captivating. And hovering about the vision’s footsteps was a little grotesque boy, comical, preposterous--a dwarf in fantastic keeping. He advanced; she saw him, and was stricken into a stone-eyed Undine. “Madam,” he said, “I bring a gage from the Count of Falckenstein yonder to the nixie of the water. He bids me say that he will redeem it at her will.” CHAPTER II. AQUAVIVA If we are to accept the testimony of Louis XV., an experienced judge in such matters, the beauty of his granddaughter, eldest child of Don Philip of Parma, was in need of no servile flattery to recommend it. The little Infanta was, in truth, at seventeen, most that heart could desire, sweet, unaffected, full of charm and playfulness. Indeed, in the eyes of some, she erred on the side of condescension, being a little disposed, like her father, to familiarity with her inferiors. Yet, on right occasion, she could assume a pretty air of dignity, consciously summoned, one might think, to the protection of a yielding over-lovable disposition. She could not bear to hurt; and though she was wilful, and possessed, and could not always resist the temptation to indulge, a strong sense of humour, her atonements generally more than expiated the faults that induced them. To men, her eyes seemed always asking pardon for the cruelty of their own kindness.