Seeing was hardly believing, but believing was more than seeing: though nothing is too good to be true, many things are too good to be grasped.
"Poor misbelieving birds of God," he said to himself, "we hover about a whole wood of the trees of life, venturing only here and there a peck, as if their fruit might be poison, and the design of our creation was our ruin! we shake our wise, owl-feathered heads, and declare they cannot be the trees of life: that were too good to be true! Ten times more consistent are they who deny there is a God at all, than they who believe in a middling kind of God--except indeed that they place in him a fitting faith!" The thoughts rose gently in his full heart, as the flowers, one after the other, stole in at his eyes, looking up from the dark earth like the spirits of its hidden jewels, which themselves could not reach the sun, exhaled in longing.

Over grass which fondled his feet like the lap of an old nurse, he walked slowly round the bed of the roses, turning again towards the house.

But there, half-way between him and it, was the lady of the garden descending to meet him!--not ancient like the garden, but young like its flowers, light-footed, and full of life.
Prepared by her brother to be friendly, she met him with a pleasant smile, and he saw that the light which shone in her dark eyes had in it rays of laughter.

She had a dark, yet clear complexion, a good forehead, a nose after no recognized generation of noses, yet an attractive one, a mouth larger than to human judgment might have seemed necessary, yet a right pleasing mouth, with two rows of lovely teeth.
All this Donal saw approach without dismay.

He was no more shy with women than with men; while none the less his feeling towards them partook largely of the reverence of the ideal knight errant.