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The venomous beauty of the place was beyond description, and in a measure I yielded to its lure and walked almost buoyantly. The sea to its skyline was blue with a depth of sapphire. The tangle of the jungle was aflash with vivid and sparkling color. Small, harmless snakes slid brightly aside, as multi-hued as shreds of rainbow.

George fluttering from her main truck in the morning breeze, the gilded portholes in her red hull and the gilded beak-head aflash in the morning sun. Miss Bishop was not to recognize this for that same Cinco Llagas which she had seen once before on a tragic day in Barbados three years ago.

"You're more than ordinarily pretty to-day," he said. "Am I? What you mean, I suppose, is that you like my gown. It's a new one. I'm wearing it for the first time, especially for you." She turned her laughing face towards him, violet eyes, flushed cheeks, golden hair, white teeth everything aflash with instant gratitude. The discovery of how easily he could command her happiness touched him.

The sleeper was awake and there he stood, his delicate face yet pinched with sleep and his eyes heavy, but alive and young, young Hilsenhoff with his soft yellow hair and mild blue eyes. On the floor before him in an attitude of adoration, knelt the woman who in the view of the law, was his wife, her eyes burned out no longer, but aflash with youthful passion.

As Mr Fosset had said, there was a dead calm on the bosom of the deep, for the slight swell that remained after the gale on the previous evening, even up to the time of my going down below, had quite disappeared, the surface of the water being as smooth as glass as far as the horizon line and all aflash now with the rosy hue of sunrise to the eastward.

One seldom sees an outstretched arm, with the hand extended, fingers close together and thumb flat against them, raised anywhere from the back seats; their occupants habitually, in such cases, wave their upraised arms with the hands clenched and thumbs extended, waggling their thumbs by half rotating their wrists, to make the thumb more conspicuous, yelling the while, so that the amphitheater is full of their insistent roar and the upper tiers aflash with flickering thumbs.

Soon we could see the innumerable banners fluttering, and then the sun struck the sea of armor and set it all aflash. Yes, it was a fine sight; I hadn't ever seen anything to beat it. At last we could make out details. All the front ranks, no telling how many acres deep, were horsemen plumed knights in armor.

The west wind came out of the wilderness, fragrant of the far-off forest, lying unknown and dread in the inland, from which the mountains, bold and blue and forbidding, lifted high their heads; and the mist was then driven back into the gloomy seas of the east, and the sun was out, shining warm and yellow, and the sea, lying in the lee of the land, was all aripple and aflash.

"The ways into which I lead your son, Madonna," said he in a low voice that boomed up and echoed in the groined ceiling overhead, "are the ways that were trod by my lord his father. And who says that the ways of Giovanni d'Anguissola were evil ways lies foully, be he man or woman, patrician or villein, pope or devil." And upon that he paused magnificently, his eyes aflash.

"What then?" she cried at last, eyes aflash through lingering tears. "Is the blame all mine? If all this is true, it is no less true that I was driven to it by my love for you and the despair to which your heartlessness and infidelity reduced me. To you," she continued, gathering force at every word, "I sacrificed everything my honour, a noble husband who loved me, all that a woman prizes.