him no more duty than she owed to any hill-fox or wounded scops who should have hidden itself in her retreat.
Sometimes he liked to talk to her; it took him in a measure out of himself to tell her those facts or traditions of science or history which to her seemed like tales of magic. Sometimes he liked to hear her sing the mournful sea-songs of the people, though oftener the sound of the mandoline hurt him with an intolerable pain, recalling to him the moonlit nights in Mantua, when his lyric underneath her walls had told his love that his boat was there, casting its shadow on the reedy waters, white with the shining of the moonbeams.
But always she was no more to him than the slave had been to the Lucumo. Her strength, her courage, her directness of speech, her power of exertion, all made her seem to him rather a youth than a girl. He had loved a woman with soft, idle hands, and languid, inert limbs, no more capable of facing the hurricane or steering through the winter waves than a peacock in his pomp of purple is capable of breasting the breeze, or cleaving the breakers, with the gyps-vulture or the storm-swallow.
