The Spring without a leaf to toss, bare and bright like a virgin fierce inher chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid out on fields wide-eyed andwatchful and entirely careless of what was done or thought by the beholders.

　　[Prue Ramsay, leaning on her father's arm, was given in marriage.

　　What, people said, could have been more fitting? And, they added,how beautiful she looked!]

　　As summer neared, as the evenings lengthened, there came to thewakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginationsof the strangest kind—of flesh turned to atoms which drove before thewind, of stars flashing in their hearts, of cliff, sea, cloud, and sky broughtpurposely together to assemble outwardly the scattered parts of the visionwithin. In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasywater, in which clouds for ever turn and shadows form, dreams persisted,and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which everygull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed todeclare (but if questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumphs, happinessprevails, order rules; or to resist the extraordinary stimulus torange hither and thither in search of some absolute good, some crystal ofintensity, remote from the known pleasures and familiar virtues,something alien to the processes of domestic life, single, hard, bright, likea diamond in the sand, which would render the possessor secure.

　　Moreover, softened and acquiescent, the spring with her bees hummingand gnats dancing threw her cloak about her, veiled her eyes, avertedher head, and among passing shadows and flights of small rain seemedto have taken upon her a knowledge of the sorrows of mankind.

　　[Prue Ramsay died that summer in some illness connected with childbirth,which was indeed a tragedy, people said, everything, they said,had promised so well.]

　　And now in the heat of summer the wind sent its spies about thehouse again. Flies wove a web in the sunny rooms; weeds that hadgrown close to the glass in the night tapped methodically at the windowpane. When darkness fell, the stroke of the Lighthouse, which had laid itselfwith such authority upon the carpet in the darkness, tracing its pattern,came now in the softer light of spring mixed with moonlight glidinggently as if it laid its caress and lingered steathily and looked andcame lovingly again. But in the very lull of this loving caress, as the longstroke leant upon the bed, the rock was rent asunder; another fold of theshawl loosened; there it hung, and swayed. Through the short summernights and the long summer days, when the empty rooms seemed tomurmur with the echoes of the fields and the hum of flies, the............