Her light descended into the valley with ineffable tenderness. The trees on the nearer shore were painted with a brush of silver-dust, and the light of dreams was spread on the grass. The lake was no longer a lake of water, but of a fairy vapour that slowly crept across to the opposite shore as the shadow of the mountain retreated. The whole valley was like a bowl slowly filling with moonlight poured from the tilted silver chalice held aloft.
Only to those whose hearts have become prescient through suffering does the moon fully reveal herself. Ralph with a catch of the breath beheld her for the first. The soft potency of her beauty drew him out from under his blanket to stand upright in the purifying rays. His pain was at the same time soothed and deepened, like a tearing rapid received into still water below. The ugly, nagging thoughts that throng upon the agitation of wakefulness were exorcized, and the great matter stood out clear.
"I love her!" Ralph silently vowed to the moon. "Please God I'll make myself worthy of it! I'll make up to her if I can something of what she has suffered!"
He sat down at the edge of the bank where Nahnya had sat that day. A great wave of emotion made a clean sweep through him, drowning selfishness, and lifting his better self high on its crest. Everything in him was changed, he felt. All his life up to this moment had been a sordid affair; it should be different hereafter. For the first time Ralph was caught up to the heights of emotion, and the poor youth thought he could remain there.
On the deepest note of his heart he breathed: "Thank God for something noble to love!"
Across the lake the mountain under the moon was still black down to the water's edge, but about its summit certain planes of snow had caught the moonlight, making an effect of weird, pale loveliness up there. Behind him the mountains to the west were fully revealed. Withdrawn and misty in the moonlight they suggested not hard facts of rock and ice and snow, but lovely, suspended fantasies of the imagination.
The strip of beach with the canoes lying upon it was at Ralph's feet. Very slowly through the haze of his dreams he became aware that there were only two canoes below instead of the three that belonged there. When the fact fully penetrated his understanding, his heart bounded in his breast. Was it possible that Nahnya——! He knew that, like himself, she had no love for a sleepless bed. If he could only find her somewhere in the moonlight, and pour out the weight of emotion that overcharged his breast! Leaping down the bank, he lifted one of the remaining canoes into the water, and embarked.
He found her. Half a mile up the lake, out in the middle, she was resting on her paddle, woman and canoe making a graceful shadow-picture in the path of moonlight. Hearing him coming, she made no effort to escape, nor when their canoes gently collided, expressed any surprise at his coming. He could not see into her face, but from her still air he guessed that the moonlight had softened her, too. Seeing her so still and lovely, his heart swelled in his breast, throttling speech again. Clinging to the gunwale of her canoe, he could only look at her. They faced each other in the attitude of prayer.
Nahnya spoke first. "It is beautiful to-night," she said softly. The pain had gone out of her voice.
"Sunlight or moonlight," Ralph said simply, "this is the most beautiful place I have ever seen."