It was their beauty that had brought to him the only solace he had known from the tyranny and cruelty of his father and it was the memory of these things that had filled his dreams in the heat of India, the cold and dirt of Portugal, and the filth and stench of the battlefields of Spain.
It seemed now as if while he kissed her, Wivina embodied everything that had moved and inspired him and lifted him sometimes only in his dreams towards the heights within himself.
And he knew that what he felt, she felt too, and as she quivered against him, not with fear but with the wonder of the emotions he evoked in her, he knew that together they touched the divine.
What they felt was not of the world, but something so perfect, so rapturous, that it was hard for their human minds to grasp the wonder
