All this came back to me as I walked alone by the lake while the day was breaking behind the mountains.
As though she had heard the trumpet of my heart calling her, she came. I did not see her till she was near me on the gravel path which leads to the châlet by the lake. There was a book of devotion in her hand. It was marked with a cross. I had forgotten my prayers that morning till I saw this.
Yet I hardly felt rebuked, for it was morning and the day was before me. With so much that was new, the old could well wait a little. For which I had bitterly to repent.
She looked beyond conception lovely as she came towards me. Taller than I had thought, for I had not seen her--you must remember--since. It seemed to me that in the night she had been recreated, and came forth fresh as Eve from the Eden sleep. Her eyelashes were so long that they swept her cheeks; and her eyes, that I had thought to be violet, had now the sparkle in them which you may see in the depths of the southern sea just where the sapphire changes into amethyst.
Did we say good-morning? I forget, and it matters little. We were walking together. How light the air was!--cool and rapturous like snow-chilled wine that is drunk beneath the rose at thirsty Teheran. The ground on which we trod, too, how strangely elastic! The pine-trees give out how good a smell! Is my heart beating at all, or only so fine and quick that I cannot count its pulsings?
What is she saying--this lady of mine? I am not speaking aloud--only thinking. Cannot I think?
She told me, I believe, why she had come out. I have forgotten why. It was her custom thus to walk in the prime. She had still the mantilla over her head, which, as soon as the sun looked over the eastern crest of the mountains, she let drop on her shoulders and so walked bareheaded, with her head carried a trifle to the side and thrown back, so that her little rounded chin was in the air.
"I have thought," she was saying when I came to myself, "all the night of what you told me of your home on the hills. It must be happiness of the greatest and most perfect, to be alone there with the voices of nature--the birds crying over the heather and the cattle in the fields."
"Good enough," I said, "it is for us moorland folk who know nothing better than each other's society--the bleating sheep to take us out upon the hills and the lamp-light streaming through the door as we return homewards."