Soon an approaching steamboat from Lucerne hid the tiny speck from Lady Milmo's view,-and gradually drew near. The inmates of the hotel came on to the verandah to watch the landing of the passengers, the morning's excitement. The gangway was thrust forward from the little jetty, and the crowd streamed ashore,—fresh English girls in straw hats, substantial fathers, anxious, lonely ladies with profusion of hand-baggage, Germans girt with satchel and vasculum, pacing sultanesquely in front of their womenkind, English parsons, happy and perspiring,—all amidst a sort of tangled undergrowth of umbrellas, and straps, and sticks, and alpenstocks purchased in Lucerne with the burnt-in names of inaccessible peaks circling round them. Some proceeded at once to the tiny railway station where the grotesquely slanting train awaited them. Others poured on to the verandah and took possession of the hotel. The gong for dejeuner sounded. Lady Milmo looked anxiously at her speck, which had become visible again, and then at her watch. The occupants of the boat gave no sign of returning shorewards. They would be late for table d'hôte. Lady Milmo waved her pocket-handkerchief until she was the last person on the verandah, and then she went into the salle-a-manger alone, feeling somewhat injured.
Meanwhile, the two in the boat had been rowing idly over the lake. Ella lay back on the cushions of the stern with half-closed eyes, while Sylvester sculled lazily. She had been very glad to see him when he arrived the evening before, and her heart had given him a little unbidden throb of welcome. His altered attitude towards her, as well as dim gleams of revelation of some fundamental change within him, had caused her to forget, or at least look back unresentfully upon old wrongs. At times an inflection of the voice, a sudden gentleness of manner, brought his father vividly back to her. It seemed as if, by some strange metempsychosis, the old man's spirit had entered into the son, and was gradually unfolding. He was still the worthiest man she knew. She lived her old life amid the jargon of culture in her aunt's house, and it wearied her, and she longed for something nobler. In Sylvester she found at least reality. She beheld him a sane, sincere, strong man, around whose life was gathered an indeterminate pathos.
The sun shone bright from a deep blue sky flecked here and there with an infinitely distant wisp of cirrus. The tiny promontories jutted out their green into the lake. Far away rose the glittering white snow-peaks, and close at hand the mass of the Righi with white specks of habitations nestling in its sides. The water plashed pleasantly against the side of the boat. Ella murmured of the loveliness around.
“The day seems to have got into my heart,” she said. “If you looked into it, you would see everything as in a camera. I wish it would last.”
“Why shouldn't it?” asked Sylvester, leaning on his sculls.
“We are going away to-morrow.”
“There is a way in which I at least could keep this in my heart for ever,” said he.
“I would that could be a way for me too,” she murmured.
“Why not, dear? I have waited for you.”
She looked round upon the tremulous beauty of sky and lake and mountain with a wistful sense of its transience. Her heart was very womanly.