Then, as she mused, the sunlight deepened on the sea, the rose became purple, the waters one beaming mass of bright color, and he who had so unconsciously aroused her sleeping soul to life rose and walked away over the sands. She watched him as he passed out of sight.
"I may never see him again," she thought; "but I shall remember his face until I die."
A great calm seemed to fall over her; the very depths of her heart had been stirred. She had been wondering so short a time before if she should ever meet any one at all approaching the ideal standard of excellence she had set up in her mind. It seemed like an answer to her thoughts when he crossed the sands.
"I may never see him again," she said; "but I shall always remember that I have met one whom I could have loved."
She sat there until the sun had set over the waters and the moon had risen; and all the time she saw before her but one image—the face that had charmed her as nothing in life had ever done before. Then, startled to find that it had grown so late, she rose and crossed the sands. Once she turned to look at the sea, and a curious thought came to her that there, by the side of the restless, shining waters, she had met her fate. Then she tried to laugh at the notion.
"To waste one's whole heart in loving a face," she thought, "would be absurd. Yet the sweetest of all heroines—Elaine—did so."
A great calm, one that lulled her brooding discontent, that stilled her angry despair, that seemed to raise her above the earth, that refined and beautified every thought, was upon her. She reached home, and Miss Hastings, looking at the beautiful face on which she had never seen so sweet an expression, so tender a light before, wondered what had come over her. So, too, like Elaine—
All night his face before her lived,
and the face was
Dark, splendid, sparkling in the silence, full
Of noble things.