She had made no more sound in her passing than a bird makes in her flight.
The sleeper never stirred, but dreamed on motionless, in the darkness and the silence, and the drowsy warmth.
He dreamed, indeed, of a woman's form half bare, golden of hue like a fruit of the south, blue veined and flushed to changing rose heats, like an opal's fire; with limbs strong and yet slender, gleaming wet with water, and brown arched feet all shining with silvery sands; with mystical eyes, black as night and amorous-lidded, and a mouth like the half-closed bud of a flower, which sighing seemed to breathe upon him all the fragrance of dim cedar-woods shrouded in summer rains, of honey-weighted heather blown by moorland winds, of almond blossoms tossed like snow against a purple sea; of all things air-born, sun-fed, fair and free.
But he saw these only as in a dream; and, as a dream, when he awakened they had passed.
Though still dark from heavy clouds, the dawn grew into morning as she went noiselessly away over the gray sands, the wet shore-paths, the sighing rushes.
The river-meadows were all flooded, and on the opposite banks the road was impassable; but on her side she could still find footing, for the ground there had a steeper rise, and the swollen tide had not reached in any public roadway too high for her to wade, or draw herself by the half-merged bushes, through it on the homeward tracks to Yprès.
The low sun was hidden in a veil of water. The old convent bells of all the country-side sang through the mists. The day was still young; but the life of the soil and the stream was waking as the birds were. Boats went down the current, bearing a sad freightage of sheep drowned in the night, and of ruined peasants, whose little wealth of stack and henhouse had been swept down by the unlooked-for tide.
From the distant banks, the voices of women came muffled through the fog, weeping and wailing for some lost lamb, choked by the water in its fold, or some pretty breadth of garden just fragrant with snowdrops and with violets, that had been laid desolate and washed away.
Through the clouds of vapor that curled in a dense opaque smoke from the wet earth, there loomed the dusky shapes of oxen; their belled horns sending forth a pleasant music from the gloom. On the air, there was a sweet damp odor from soaked grasses and upturned sods, from the breath of the herds lowing hock deep in water, from the green knots of broken primrose roots sailing by on the brown, rough river.
A dying bush of gray lavender swept by on the stream; it had the fresh moulds of its lost garden-home still about it, and in its stems a robin had built her little nest; the nest streamed in tatters and ruin on the wind, the robin flew above the wreck, fluttering and uttering shrill notes of woe.