Whilst yet it seemed night still, the silence trembled with the pipe of waking birds, the darkness quivered with the pale first rays of dawn.
Over the flood and the fields the first light broke. From the unseen world behind the mist, faint bells rang in the coming day.
He moved in his sleep, and his eyes unclosed, and looked at her face as it hung above him, like some drooped rose that was heavy with the too great sweetness of a summer shower.
It was but the gaze of a moment, and his lids dropped again, weighted with the intense weariness of a slumber that held all his senses close in its leaden chains. But the glance, brief though it was, had been conscious;—under it a sudden flush passed over her, a sudden thrill stirred in her, as the life stirs in the young trees at the near coming of the spring. For the first time since her birth she became wholly human.
A sharp terror made her tremble like a leaf; she put his head softly from her on the ground, and rose, quivering, to her feet.
It was not the gods she feared, it was herself.
She had never once known that she had beauty, more than the flower knows it blowing on the wind. She had passed through the crowds of fair and market, not knowing why the youths looked after her with cruel eyes all aglow. She had walked through them, indifferent and unconscious, thinking that they wanted to hunt her down as an unclean beast, and dared not, because her teeth were strong.
She had taken a vague pleasure in the supple grace of her own form, as she had seen it mirrored in some woodland pool where she had bathed amidst the water-lilies, but it had been only such an instinctive and unstudied pleasure as the swan takes in seeing her silver breast shine back to her, on the glassy current adown which she sails.
Now,—as she rose and stood, as the dawn broke, beside him, on the hearth, and heard the birds' first waking notes, that told her the sun was even then touching the edge of the veiled world to light, a hot shame smote her, and the womanhood in her woke.
She looked down on herself and saw that her soaked skirts were knotted above her knees, as she had bound them when she had leaped from the boat's side; that her limbs were wet and glistening with river water, and the moisture from the grasses, and the sand and shingle of the shore; and that the linen of her vest, threadbare with age, left her arms bare, and showed through its rents the gleam of her warm brown skin and the curves of her shining shoulders.