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214 dark eagle lustre of his eyes> and lent its warmth to the Murillo-like bronze of his cheek. She was a woman of the world; that noble truthfulness, that gallant faith, that knightly earnestness were new and very strange to her. They touched her. "If Tannhäuser had loved like that—who knows?—even she, the Teufelinne, might have been redeemed. She could not have been faithless to such faith." she said, half musingly, rather following oat her thoughts than addressing him; and in her voice there was a vague pathetic pain.

Mad words rose to his lips in reply—words that he had to hold down in silence; the room seemed dizzy round him, the odours of the flowers reeled in his brain as though they were narcotics; he watched, like a man half-blinded, her hand wander among the scarlet blossoms, and toy with the waters of the fountain. It was a delirium; and, for all its feverish pain, he would not have exchanged it to have back the happiest and most tranquil hour of his past. He had dreamed of her, till he had loved her, as utterly as ever a man loved a woman; he was in her presence—at last!—and all love that before might be but a dream became at once with giant growth a passion. She did not—with him at least