The evening grew to night, and still I lingered. The moon was nearly at the full, and exceedingly bright. The tide was down. The scene was magical; I could not leave it. I said to myself, 'I will go and stand on the very spot where Winifred stood when she lisped "certumly" to the proposal of her little lover.'
It was not, after all, till this evening that I really knew how entirely she was a portion of my life.
I went and stood by the black boulder where I had received the little child's prompt reply. There was not a grain left, I knew, of that same sand which had been hallowed by the little feet of Winifred, but it served my mood just as well as though every grain had felt the beloved pressure. For that the very sands had loved the child, I half believed.
I said to myself, as I sat down upon the boulder, 'At this very moment she is here, she is in Raxton. In a certain little cottage there is a certain little room.' And then I longed to leave the sands, to go and stand in front of Wynne's cottage and dream there. But that would be too foolish. 'I must get home,' I thought. 'The night will pass somehow, and in the morning I shall, as sure as fate, see her flitting about the sands she loves, and then what I have sworn to say to her I will say, and what I have sworn to do I will do, come what will.'
Then came the puzzling question, how was I to greet her when we met? Was I to run up and kiss her, and hear her say, 'Oh, I'm so pleased!' as she would sometimes say when I kissed her of yore? No: her deportment in the morning forbade _that_. Or was I to raise my hat and walk up to her saying, 'How do you do, Miss Wynne? I'm glad to see you back, Miss Wynne,' for she was now neither child nor young woman, she was a 'girl.' Perhaps I had better rush up to her in a bluff, hearty way, and say: 'How do you do, Miss Winifred? Delighted to see you back to Raxton.' Finally, I decided that circumstance must guide me entirely, and I sat upon the boulder meditating.
After a while I saw, or thought I saw, in the far distance, close to the waves, a moving figure among the patches of rocks and stones (some black and some white) that break the continuity of the sand on that shore at low water.