... Best of all she loved the waterfall. It was her shower-bath. But, more than that, it was her friend and confidante, and, beyond aught else, a living, glimmering, varicolored thing of gossamer beauty. It talked with her, it was at once handmaiden and musician and troubadour; it plashed and sang and poured its cadences into quiet harmonies which sank into her soul. It had leapt and sparkled and poured itself onward unstintedly, unafraid, for a thousand years; for a thousand years would it keep up its merry dancings, uncaring if only the tall pines watched or if men and maids brought hither their loves and hates and hopes and fears. Unstable it was always, always falling; secure was it in its diaphanous veilings of its own merry immortality. She loved it for its abandon, for its recklessness, for its translucent myriad beauties. It lived; it sang and sparkled; it filled the moment with musical murmurings and recked not of all those vague threats and shadows of a vague future.... She sat here, quiet under the spell of its dashings and splashings and eerie flutings ... musing, her soul drawn forth into all those vague and troublous musings which beset the heart of youth.
Youth? Young, too, was Bruce Standing! He hearkened to the cascading waters; he listened to the harp-tongued whisperings of the pines.... He had done everything wrong; he told himself that a thousand, thousand times. Yet he told himself savagely that throughout the insanities, the veritable madnesses of constricted human life there flowed always, onward and sweepingly upward, the great, triumphal, eternal forces of destiny. And, in the end ... in the end ... it all made for good. For eternal and triumphant good.
... After all, but the old, old story of man and maid, converging to the one gleaming, focal point though across distances oceans-wide removed.
He had his point of view; Lynette Brooke had her point of view. Yet it remains that from two widely separated peaks two eager hearts may see the same sun rise.
"Tell me," he said once. "What manner of man is this Babe Deveril? I know him as a man may know a man; you know him otherwise. Tell me; what have you found him to be?"
Never would she have been Lynette, had she not been ever quick of instinct ... instinct leaping, never looking, yet so certain to strike true! She read the thought under a thought; there came a living, joyous gloating; she cried warmly, all the while watching him:
"A true friend and a gentleman! A man unafraid ... one like a loyal knight of the olden time! Like one of the King Arthur's knights...."
"Like one," he growled, deep down in his throat, angrily, "who saw another Lynette across the four fords? That's not true, girl; else he would not have forsaken you so long! Nor would he have given up so easily when, in your view, I beat him down and sent him up over the ridge!"
"He'll come back!"
"You think so?"