Mr. Hardy Baldacre had an imposing, stalwart figure, by no means unfashionably attired, and Nature, while unsolicitous about his moral endowments, had gifted him with a handsome face. If not in the bloom of youth, he had not passed by a day the matured vigour of early manhood. As he bent his dark eyes upon Antonia and poured forth his not entirely original address, but which, heard in the tones of a pleading flesh-and-blood lover, sounded a deal better than it reads, Antonia felt a species of mesmeric attraction to the fatal and irrevocable ‘yes,’ which should open a new phase of life to her and obliterate the maddening, hopeless, endless past. _For one moment_, for one only, the fate of Antonia Frankston wavered on the dread eternal balance. She fluttered, birdlike, under the fascination of his serpentine gaze. Her words of regret and courteous dismissal refused to find utterance. At length she said, ‘I must have time to consider your flattering but quite unexpected offer. You will, I am sure, not press for an immediate answer. I will see you again. Meanwhile let me tell you that I value your good opinion, and shall always recall with pleasure your very kind intention of to-day.’
But, with that still hour of evening meditation in which Antonia was wont to indulge before retiring, came calmer, humbler, more tranquillising thoughts. As she sat at her chamber window, looking out over the wide waters of the bay, in which a crescent moon caused the endless bright expanse of tremulous silver, the frowning headlands, the garden slopes, to be all clearly, delicately visible,—as she heard the rhythmical, solemn cadence of the deep-toned eternal surge,—she recalled the moon-lighted eves, the soul-to-soul communing, of ‘that lost time.’
A strong reactionary feeling occupied her heart. It seemed as if, like the rushing of the tide, the stormy sway of the ocean she loved so well, her heart had surged in rising tempest and with passion’s flow, to ebb with yet fuller retrogression. Surely such were the words of this murmuring sea-song on the white midnight strand, which calmed, as with a magic anodyne, her restless, rebellious mood.
‘I have been wayward and wicked,’ she half sighed to herself, ‘false to my better self, to the teaching of a life, unmindful of my duty to my father, who loves me better than life, of my duty to One above, who has shielded and cherished me, all undeserving as I am, up to this hour. I will repent of my sin. I will abase myself, and by prayer and penitence seek strength where alone it can be found.’