"If this were only a holiday ... instead of imprisonment!"
She, too, thought of Babe Deveril, as was inevitable. And in many ways: One, always recurrent, was: "Could she have been as _sure_ of Babe Deveril as she was of Bruce Standing? As secure in her utter conviction of safety?" And here was a question to which she found no ready answer. Babe Deveril, leaping full-breastedly into the stream which had swept her off her feet, had been a friend to her from the beginning; from the beginning Bruce Standing had been a menace.
... Best of all she loved the waterfall. It was her shower-bath. But, more than that, it was her friend and confidante, and, beyond aught else, a living, glimmering, varicolored thing of gossamer beauty. It talked with her, it was at once handmaiden and musician and troubadour; it plashed and sang and poured its cadences into quiet harmonies which sank into her soul. It had leapt and sparkled and poured itself onward unstintedly, unafraid, for a thousand years; for a thousand years would it keep up its merry dancings, uncaring if only the tall pines watched or if men and maids brought hither their loves and hates and hopes and fears. Unstable it was always, always falling; secure was it in its diaphanous veilings of its own merry immortality. She loved it for its abandon, for its recklessness, for its translucent myriad beauties. It lived; it sang and sparkled; it filled the moment with musical murmurings and recked not of all those vague threats and shadows of a vague future.... She sat here, quiet under the spell of its dashings and splashings and eerie flutings ... musing, her soul drawn forth into all those vague and troublous musings which beset the heart of youth.
Youth? Young, too, was Bruce Standing! He hearkened to the cascading waters; he listened to the harp-tongued whisperings of the pines.... He had done everything wrong; he told himself that a thousand, thousand times. Yet he told himself savagely that throughout the insanities, the veritable madnesses of constricted human life there flowed always, onward and sweepingly upward, the great, triumphal, eternal forces of destiny. And, in the end ... in the end ... it all made for good. For eternal and triumphant good.