ORBEROSIA loved her husband, but she did not love him alone. At the hour when Venus lightens in the pale sky, whilst Kraken scattered¹ terror through the villages, she used to visit in his moving hut, a young shepherd of Dalles called Marcel, whose pleasing form was invested with inexhaustible vigour². The fair Orberosia shared the shepherd’s aromatic³ couch with delight, but far from making herself known to him, she took the name of Bridget, and said that she was the daughter of a gardener in the Bay of Divers⁴. When regretfully she left his arms she walked across the smoking fields towards the Coast of Shadows, and if she happened to meet some belated peasant she immediately spread out her garments like great wings and cried:

“Passer by, lower your eyes, that you may not have to say, ‘Alas⁵! alas! woe⁶ is me, for I have seen the angel of the Lord.’”

The villagers tremblingly knelt with their faces to the ground. And several of them used to say that angels, whom it would be death to see, passed along the roads of the island in the night time.

Kraken did not know of the loves of Orberosia and Marcel, for he was a hero, and heroes never discover the secrets of their wives. But though he did not know of these loves, he reaped the benefit of them. Every night he found his companion more good-humoured and more beautiful, exhaling⁷ pleasure and perfuming the nuptial⁸ bed with a delicious odour of fennel and vervain. She loved Kraken with a love that never became importunate⁹ or anxious, because she did not rest its whole weight on him alone.

This lucky infidelity of Orberosia was

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