There was cheerful candle-gleam where he was wont to find dimness; a gay sound of laughter and words where silence used to reign; and instead of Master Simon’s bent grey head, there rose before his sight, haloed with light, so white and pure as almost to seem luminous itself, a young forehead set in a radiance of crisp, fiery-gold hair. His eyes encountered the beam of two unknown eyes, exquisitely blue. Blue as his star!
And he thought he still saw visions; thought that his star had as suddenly and sweetly taken living shape here below as above in the unattainable skies.
CHAPTER VI
EYES, BLUE AS HIS STAR
——Dwelt on my heaven a face
Most starry-fair, but kindled from within
As ’twere with dawn!
—Tennyson (The Lover’s Tale).
On the new-comer’s entrance Ellinor looked up. The smile was arrested on her lips and her eyes grew grave with wonder: there was something curiously unsubstantial, something almost fantastic in the man that stood thus, framed in the gaping darkness of the doorway.
That pale head, refined to ætherealisation, with its masses of dense, black hair; that straight figure, unusually tall and seeming taller still by reason of its exceeding leanness, romantically draped in the folds of a sable-lined cloak; above all, those eyes, under penthouse brows, singularly light and luminous in spite of their deep-setting, gazing straight at her, through her and beyond her—the eyes of the dreamer, or rather of the seer! In her surprise she failed for the moment to connect with this apparition the forgotten identity of the “cousin David” she had known in her girl days; the smooth-cheeked lad—dandy, fox-hunter, poet, politician—but in every phase, image of assertive and satisfied youth.
Master Simon broke the spell of the singular moment.