A Struggle for a Ring — page 141: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A DREAM BY THE SEA. 137 green woods, listening to the bird’s song, happy with a deep, silent happiness neither of them quite understood. Lady Ethel raised her beautiful face to his one morning, as she said: ‘‘T cannot imagine why it is, but this summer seems to me the fairest I have seen yet. I never remember the sun- shine so bright, or the flowers so sweet.” He drank in the beauty and witchery of those lovely eyes before he answered. ‘‘T can say just the same thing,” he replied; ‘‘I never remember a summer half so fair.” Together they lingered in the beautiful conservatories, in the flower-gardens, in the long picture-galleries, and the magnificent saloons; together they sang and danced—had talked until they knew each other's thoughts and ideas better than though they had lived for years together. He had begun to realize what he was doing—to know that the sweet witchery, the glamour falling over him, was all love—to realize that he lived only in her presence, and that without her life was all one great, terrible blank—to realize that he loved her with the one great love, the one great passion of his life, before which all others paled and grew dim. Not at first; at first her beauty struck him as the beauty of woman had never done before—he thought her the loveliest and fairest, he admired her as he would have done the Venus of Milo, or the portrait of Beatrice | Cenci; she was a new revelation of beauty to him.» He ~ fell, without knowing it, from that state of blind worship into the deepest pit passion ever digs forman. He under- stood it at last when a feeling of despair came over him, and he said to himself that he would give his very life to kiss her once, even should he then die. It was when that thought came over him that he realized for the first time Gomichbooks (E(@)