A scarlet flush was rimming the east, and a glow began to creep over the dull sea. Further and further it spread, while everything around took clear and definite form. The cliffs, the landslip, the coastguard station, the shore, all grew out gradually and yet rapidly from the darkness, and every moment the color waxed more bright, and the sky, which had seemed so dense, became translucent and dark blue, while one by one the pale stars went out, extinguished by the rosy-fingered Eos.
A cold fresh breeze whistled by, and Claud shivered as it passed. It reminded him of the sad sighing of old Tithonus, left helpless in the cold regions of the dark, whilst Aurora, warm and blooming, sprang up to meet the sun. Unconsciously to himself, he wished that Wynifred Allonby stood by him to watch that dawn—she would have understood. He could not talk of Tithonus to Henry Fowler. His eye roamed over
"The ever silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn."
Ah! what was that which shivered like a silver arrow through the dull haze that brooded over the sluggish waters? The mist had become transparent, golden, luminous—such a glory as might any moment break away to disclose the New Jerusalem coming down out of the heaven of heavens.
And now the whole sea was one mass of pearly and rose and amber light, which had not as yet faded into "the light of common day." All was illusion—the infancy of day, the time of fairy-tales, like that childhood of the world when wonders happened, and "Ilion, like a mist, rose into towers."
A slight exclamation from Henry broke his musing, and made him turn his head.
The Swan lay motionless, her whiteness warmed and softened by the still mysterious light, till it looked almost like the plumage of the bird whose name she bore. The radiance gleamed on the motionless sails, and shimmered on the sea all round her.
Close to the prow stood Percivale. He had taken off his coat, and looked all white as he stood in the glow. Lifting his hat, he waved it to the watchers on the shore, with a gesture like that of one victorious, and, as he did so, up darted the sun with a leap above the sea, and its first ray shot straight across the sparkling water, to rest on his fair head like a benediction.