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The young nurse looked up in wonder at the hard voice, usually soft as the cooing of a ring-dove. "I will go," she replied, "if the signora will take me. I leave none behind that I love."
Hannah Colson, with all her youthful charms, might think herself a lucky damsel in securing the affections of such a lover as this; and that she did actually think so was the persuasion of those who knew her best of her mother, of her brother William, and of Lucy Meadows; although the coy, fantastic beauty, shy as a ring-dove, wild as a fawn of the forest, was so far from confessing any return of affection, that whilst suffering his attentions, and accepting his escort to the rural gaieties which beseemed her age, she would now profess, even while hanging on his arm, her intention of never marrying, and now coquet before his eyes with some passing admirer whom she had never seen before.
"And the third door," droned on the rhythmic voice, "into an open hall, hung with cages of sandal-wood and eagle-wood; full of birds which made sweet music, such as the mocking bird, and the cusha, the merle, the turtle dove and the Nubian ring-dove." A trifle restively Ryder stirred. He liked birds but he wanted to be getting on to that fortieth door and this was slow progress.
Insects also buzzed about, creating a humming music of their own, while flocks of starlings startled by his approach flew over the field next him to the one further on, exhibiting their speckled plumage as they fluttered overhead, and the whistle of the blackbird and coo of the ring-dove could be heard in the distance. But the vicar was thinking of none of these things.
Her rich hair, thus released and dishevelled by the exercise, fell partly over her face in wavy ringlets; and her musical laugh and words of sportive endearment sounded on Kenelm's ear more joyously than the thrill of the skylark, more sweetly than the coo of the ring-dove. He approached towards Mrs. Cameron. Lily turned suddenly and saw him.
There is a large grey ring-dove that sits in the blazing sun all through the hottest hours of the day, and says coo-coo, coo, coo-coo, coo until the melancholy sweet monotony of that sound is as thoroughly mixed up in my brain with 110° in the shade as physic in my infantile memories with the peppermint lozenges which used to 'put away the taste, But as for these creatures, which confess the heat and come into the house and gasp, I feel drawn to them.
It is pleasant to be happy, but oh! how more than pleasant to have some one near, to whom all these charming sensations can be expressed. I think one is never quite content alone, but then who ever is really content? "How exquisitely pure every thing seems; my little chamber here, with its delicate matting and snowy draperies, looks like the nest of a ring-dove, it is so white and quiet.
Of the stock-dove we can only say that, like the ring-dove, it has increased in spite of the persecution it is subject to, since no person out after pigeons would spare it because it is without a white collar. With the exception of the county of Buckinghamshire it is not on the schedule anywhere in the country.
So we forgave him when he pulled all the feathers out of a ring-dove that was a valued present from an old native rajah; when he turned lamp-oil into the ice cream, and when he broke a rare Satsuma bowl in trying to catch a lizard. He was always so penitent after each misadventure!
Her hand was scarce larger than a hazel-leaf, and her foot not longer than the wing of the ring-dove. Her arm was so very slight, that it seemed the breeze might break it.
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