When the rest of the household were in deep sleep, Randal stood long at
his open window, looking over the dreary, comfortless scene,--the moon
gleaming from skies half-autumnal, half-wintry, upon squalid decay,
through the ragged fissures of the firs; and when he lay down to rest,
his sleep was feverish, and troubled by turbulent dreams.
However, he was up early, and with an unwonted colour in his cheeks,
which his sister ascribed to the country air. After breakfast, he took
his way towards Hazeldean, mounted upon a tolerable, horse, which he
borrowed of a neighbouring farmer who occasionally hunted. Before noon,
the garden and ter race of the Casino came in sight. He reined in his
horse, and by the little fountain at which Leonard had been wont to eat
his radishes and con his book, he saw Riccabocca seated under the shade
of the red umbrella. And by the Italian's side stood a form that a Greek
of old might have deemed the Naiad of the Fount; for in its youthful
beauty there was something so full of poetry, something at once so sweet
and so stately, that it spoke to the imagination while it charmed the
sense.
Randal dismounted, tied his horse to the gate, and, walking down a
trellised alley, came suddenly to the spot. His dark shadow fell over
the clear mirror of the fountain just as Riccabocca had said, "All here
is so secure from evil!--the waves of the fountain are never troubled
like those of the river!" and Violante had answered in her soft native
tongue, and lifting her dark, spiritual eyes, "But the fountain would be
but a lifeless pool, oh my father, if the spray did not mount towards the
skies!"