JUDITH’S brother had chosen to sink his deeper convictions and to embrace expediency as his lawful spouse. A callow pessimism had persuaded him to scoff at what he chose to denounce as “the mad posing of hyper-Æsthetical principles.” He loved Ophelia Gusset in a rich physical fashion; the mediÆval spirituality of the poets had cheated him too long. He began to believe Dante a fool and Petrarch a person who had sentimentally wasted his opportunities. Five thousand a year, a romantic home, a superb and comely wife—these facts suggested compromises that were not to be contemned. What could not money give him—Spanish orange-groves, Italian cypress thickets, brilliant books, pictures, opulence in mood and movement. Were there not thousands of unfortunates scrambling in life’s gutters for bare bread! Pandering to that glib-mouthed sophist known as “common-sense,” he abandoned certain spiritual ideals as the mere excrescences of youth. Having kissed expediency upon both cold cheeks, he was prepared for her to lead him into her most splendid habitation.

Coincidence, predestination, or the voice of the subconscious soul! What matters it which we accept, provided we recognize the intense motive power a single circumstance may exert upon some individual atom. Gabriel Strong, poling out his light “outrigger” from the Saltire Hall boat-house, had no vision of judgment before his eyes. He bared his elbows, swung out manfully, heard the ripples prattling at the prow. He was a man who loved to possess his physical moments in solitude. The quickened blood set streams of thought aspinning, the deeper breathing etherealized the brain.

There had been heavy rain in the night, and blue shadows covered the woods. A haze of heat shimmered above the mist-dimmed hills. Infinite freshness breathed from the dew-brilliant meadows. May seemed to have lifted once again her fair young face to the sun. A deep splendor shone upon wood and meadow, a green radiance dappled over with gold. Earth smiled through her tears; the shadowy trees shook pearls from their stately towers.

“Young man, my ribbon.”

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.

“I am afraid the color will run,” he remarked.

“Will it?”

“I am not an authority.”

She looked at him with a certain critical candor, and said nothing. The man colored, though he considered himself a metaphysician.

She had a number of pins in a kerchief on the grass, and without more ado she began calmly to bind her hair. The man could see that it was damp and lustreless, not yet reburnished by the sun. The girl had been bathing in the Mallan. The idea inspired him. It was so mediÆval—nay, classic.

“Do not let me waste your time.”

“I am not in a hurry,” he answered.

“You want to talk to me.”

“I?”

“You do not go.”

“Why should I?”

There was a curious and superb simplicity about her that confounded custom. Gabriel had a glib tongue on most occasions. For the nonce he discovered gaucherie in his constitution.

“You are fond of the river?” said the girl, smoothing the blue ribbon between her fingers.

“I am fond of being alone.”

“So am I.”

“Do you mean that for a hint?”

“I am always alone. What should I hint at? I dislike obscurities.”

“I was only sensitive for your sake,” said the man, with a smile.

“That is chivalry, is it not?”

“Perhaps.”

“You may talk to me—if you like.”

Gabriel considered her with an elemental sense of awe. Her manner was so essentially natural that he could imagine no flaw in her modesty. He had had abundant experience of coquettes. The girl did not appeal to him as such, rather as a Diana or a Belphoebe.

She sat down a short distance from him, and flicked her skirt over her feet. She had bound back her hair over her neck in rich and ample clusters. Her blouse was still open at the throat.

“Do you live here?”

“At Saltire. And you?”

“With my father, on the hills above Rilchester. Are you twenty yet?”

Gabriel smiled in such fashion that her eyes echoed his.

“I am older than you are,” he said.

“Much?”

“You are illogical; how should I know?”

“You do not look older; I am twenty. I like your face; you have gray eyes, so have I. I like your hair, too; it is dark and shines in the sun. What shall we talk about?”

“As we have begun.”

“Our ages?”

“Ourselves, rather.”

“I never talk about myself.”

“Why not?”

“I never have any one to talk to.”

The sense that he had passed back to childhood seized upon Gabriel with intense vividness. An artificial intellectuality appeared to have fallen from his being. The rust of experience no longer roughened his soul. He faced his deeper self, and the impression startled him. His manhood seemed to untrammel itself from the intricacies of world-wise philosophy; and he stood in the sun.

“You are lonely?” he said, with a sympathetic flexion of voice.

Her face brightened with a peculiarly luminous look, and her eyes held his.

“No.”

“You have friends?”

“None.”

“Strange.”

“Is it?”

“I imagine so. Even the most reserved being possesses some one he can call a friend. Perhaps you are jealous of conferring the epithet.”

“What epithet?”

“Friend.”

“My father does not believe in friends.”

“No?”

“He says they are too expensive.”

Gabriel smiled, but the girl’s face was unceasingly solemn. Her expression, indeed, appeared to partake of the perpetual seriousness of an earnest nature. A calm, unconscious melancholy shone forth from her mind like a glimmer of sunlight reflected from some golden shrine.

“Your father must be something of a cynic.”

“My father is poor.”

“Only in gold, perhaps.”

“In mind, too,” she said, with transcendent and ingenuous candor.

“But you love him?”

“I do not know,” she retorted, with a certain contemplative sincerity. “I have only read of love. I know Britomart and Florimel. I do not think Britomart would have loved my father.”

“Why not?”

“I do not know.”

“Perhaps I ought not to ask you.”

They lapsed suddenly into silence. The girl with the gray eyes was looking afar into the shadows of the woods. The water murmured at their feet, a calm, unceasing monologue like the soft prattle of a mother.

The silence proved but a prelude to one of the girl’s strange and flashing interrogations of the enigmas of life.

“Do you believe in a God?” she said.

“You ask strange questions.”

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps because I never talk to any one. People only speak to me in books. And one reads of so many gods—Zeus and Apollo, Allah and Christ, Venus, and great Ormuzd. Some mysterious sorrow often seems to tantalize my soul. All nature, the sea, the winds, yearn for something that can never be, and my soul echoes them. I stretch out my hands blindly, as to a dark sky. There should be power and light beyond, yet my heart gropes under the dim stars. There is often great hunger in me, hunger that I cannot satisfy. I yearn for something—what, I cannot tell. I wonder what we live for?”

“Perhaps to die.”

“And then?”

“There men disagree.”

She mused a moment like a Cassandra.

“All men seem to disagree,” she said.

Probably another half-hour passed before the girl rose from the grass with the consciousness of parting. Gabriel, soft-fibred pessimist, stood beside her with an utter sense of unreality bearing upon his brain.

“Good-bye; I must go home.”

“And I, too.”

She flushed a very little and her eyes kindled.

“Do you know—” she began.

“Well?”

“I am feeling lonely for the first time in my life.”

Gabriel said nothing.

“You will tell me your name?”

“Yes. Gabriel Strong.”

“I like it.”

“And yours?”

“Joan Gildersedge.”

She made a step towards him suddenly and extended her hand.

“You may kiss it,” she said. “They did that in the old days.”

And then she left him.

But Gabriel rowed home slowly down the Mallan with his head bowed down in thought. There were certain words of an old legend stirring in his heart, and the girl’s eyes followed him.

“Now when Tristan and Iseult had drunk of the potion, Love, who never resteth but besetteth all hearts, crept softly into the hearts of the twain. But it was not wine that was therein, though like unto it, but bitter pain and enduring sorrow of heart, of which the twain at last lay dead.”