“And you didn’t seem to belong at all to my eyes,” he told her. “You belonged out in the distances of ocean. You came closer and closer during the days in the open boat—but here you belong. It seems to me that you have come home—and how I wish I could stay, too.”
“I wish you could stay—but I know that there is unfinished work in New York.”
“I wonder how he knew?” Bellair questioned.
“He saw very clearly. He was not flesh at all—that last day——”
“After the night—when he prayed.... You saw him that night?”
“Yes.”
Her innate sense of beauty startled him afresh every day. All that he idealised was an open book to her. Bellair had planned his house in the New York room. The greatest houses are planned so, by those who suffer and are confined. It had not come to him in the form of this stone cottage by the sea. This was not his dream that had come true here, although in many ways it was fairer than his dream. Very plainly, this little rock-bound eyrie was of her fashioning—the very atoms of it, drawing together to conform with the picture in her mind. He loved the place better so. Perhaps her thought of a home had been the stronger.
“It is almost perfect now,” she would say. “The neglect has made it right. A few roses, some bee-hives, vines and perennials—the rest is just clearing and cleansing. I could go over all the leaves and branches with a soapy sponge. The rest is to prune and thin and cleanse—so the sunlight is not shut from anywhere altogether—so it all can breathe——”
He caught the picture in her mind—foliage cut away for the play of sun and wind everywhere—the chaste and enduring beauty of leaf and stone and moving water. And now appeared a bit of her nature quite as real:
“And then those extra two rooms, I could rent them and give board——”