With quick hands she unbarred a shutter and, her impetuous strength making little of rusty resistance, flung open the casement before he had had time to divine her intention. He halted on his way to help her, arrested by the gush of blinding light and the blast of wild wind, that seemed to leap at his throat. “Oh,” she exclaimed, standing in the full ray and breathing in—so it seemed to him—both the elements. “Oh, the warm light, the sweet air!” A line of Shakespeare awoke in some corner of his memory: “A thing of fire and air.” ... How vividly it seemed to fit her then! Without, the changeful day had turned to wind and sun. She stood in the very shaft of the light, in the flood of the breeze; he stood watching her from within, in the gloom and the stagnation. Her black gown fluttered and turned flame at the edges; alternately clung to, and waved away from her straight limbs, now revealing, now throwing into shadow the curves of a foot that, in its sandal, pressed the ground as lithely as ever a Diana’s arrested on the spring. The fresh airs engulfed themselves under her kerchief into her white bosom. It was as if he could watch them playing around her throat, even as if he could see them fluttering and flattering her hair.... Her hair! The sun’s sparkles had got into it! Now it rose, nimbus-like; now it danced, a spray of fire, back from her forehead; now again, under the flying touches, it fell back and rippled like a cornfield in the breeze. This radiant creature! The more Sir David looked, the further apart he felt his fate from hers. She seemed to belong all to the dancing wind and the glad sun-light. From such an one as he, from his melancholy, his gloom, his fading life, she seemed as much cut off as ever the unattainable stars from his wondering night watch. Thus they stood for the space of a minute. Then Ellinor turned. Light and freshness now filled the great room. The keen breath of the woods gaily drove into corners and chased away the mouldy vapours, the vague, shut-up breath of the old brocades, of the crumbling potpourris, of the sandal-wood and Indian rose; even as the light of Heaven drove the shadows back under the cabinets and behind the pillars, and awoke to life the gold moulding and the fleur-de-lis on the white walls, the delicate wreaths and tracery on the trellised ceilings. “See, cousin David, the ghosts are gone!” But the man had withdrawn to the shadow. There was now no answering light in his eye. He had now no phrase, tardy in coming, yet quick in the sympathy of her thought, such as had before delighted her. What had come to him? She gave a little laugh; the vigour, the freedom from without had got so keenly into her veins that she was as though intoxicated. “I vow,” she cried, “you are like a ghost yourself! Why, you look like a dim knight from the tapestry yonder in the hall, wandering ...”