The woods had poured down to possess this city of the dead. Crumbling flints showed amid the claws of some huge oak’s roots. The old walls were bowered in green, mantled in ivy, plumed with gilliflower, snap-dragon, and flowering grass. The forum, an open square closed with grass banks, stood almost free of the trees. Its roadway and the foundation of its shops still showed in the turf. Fragments of pillars and pediments lay sunken in the sward. Flowers bloomed over the dead pavements, a mist of daisies, harebells, and golden ragwort. On the summit of the central mound stood the ruins of an altar, wreathed and overrun by masses of purple nightshade. Southward the sea glimmered. Around rolled the wooden hills, nebulous and haze-wrapped, guardians of mystery.
Gabriel climbed the altar mound and sentinelled himself on the mouldering stone. To the romantic mind a tender melancholy wraps the infinite with all the idyllic colors of twilight. To the eye of the poet seas are bluer, skies more splendid, moons more magical, roses more ravishing to the soul. It is only the dullard who beholds in a cloud nothing but visible vapor. Primeval man was more spiritual in many of his notions than the commercial gentleman of to-day.
Hope is often father to the fact. Desire and dream of a thing, and in some strange fashion the imagined fruit bends sudden to the hand. Day-dreams are the first dawn-shafts of great minds. Those who live for the present deserve nothing of the future. As for Gabriel, the stars would have fallen in his lap if his dreams had gotten a proportionate reward.
Thought-waves or no, there is some strong influence flowing from importunate thought. Spiritual waves of desire move betwixt soul and soul, drawing them imperceptibly towards each other. Love beacons unto love, even over hill and sea. As water to the moon, so Joan Gildersedge had been drawn from her home that day. Some vibrating lustre-light of the soul had set her wandering on the hills above the sea. Even from childhood she had haunted the gray ruins by the woods, weaving idyls out of the past, listening like Joan of France to the mysterious utterances of nature.
Thus it befell that morning that Gabriel, seated on the crumbling altar, saw the figure of a girl moving in the shadows under the trees. She moved slowly, with eyes downcast. Even in miniature her form had that superb eloquence of grace that was more than Grecian, seeing that a more than Grecian spirit abode there in the flesh.