The hail came like elfin music from under the green canopy of a willow. There was a suggestive beauty in the voice that had spoken. Gabriel, dreamer of dreams, had imagined himself supreme in most egotistic solitude. He “backed water” spontaneously. His sculls foamed in the tide.
Philosophy or no philosophy, he saw a young girl standing above him on the bank, with sudden sunlight streaming through her loosened hair. Her face shone like ivory under the green foliage arching her head. The water ran silver bright below the grass and water-weeds at her feet. There was a strange queenliness in her manner as she looked down upon him and pointed with one white hand at the rippling shallows.
“My ribbon.”
Gabriel colored with a curious spontaneity that was particularly boyish. The girl stood above him like some golden child peering deep-eyed from the green umbrage of romance. Her left hand was hooked in the unfastened collar of her blouse. Her shapely throat showed to its ivory base betwixt the golden curtaining of her hair.
“My ribbon,” she explained, with no lessening of her unmeditated stateliness. “I have dropped it in the water. You will give it me.”
A sudden memory swept out from the shadows of days past. Gabriel had seen that face, that cloud of hair, before. He remembered as in a forsaken dream, the blue sea and yellow sand, the black cliffs crescenting the still lagoon. A great silence seemed to fall within his heart as of a forest awed by the full moon.
A band of light blue silk floated amid the green weeds. Gabriel reached for it, pressed out the water with his fingers, stood up in the shallow boat, and hesitated. The girl did not move from her grassy dais under the willow. Her shadow fell athwart the water. When Gabriel looked at her, her eyes were not on the ribbon but upon his face.
The coincidence decided him. He took the near scull from the swivel, poled in, stepped into the bow as the stem brushed the bank, took the painter, gripped a tuft of coarse grass, and scrambled ashore. He twisted the rope round the straggling root of a willow and stood up.
“Thank you.”
The ribbon passed between them; their fingers touched. It was mere mesmerism, nothing more. Gabriel felt stolid.