voice monotonously soothing, helped him to find himself,—­and to find himself newer, fresher, a more vital personality.  This newer Peter Champneys was not going to be, perhaps, so easy-going a chap.  He was more insistent, he was sterner; to the art-conscience, in itself a troublesome possession, he was adding the race-conscience, which questions, demands, and will have nothing short of the truth.  He had been forced to see things as they are, things stripped of pleasant trappings and made brutally bare; and his conscience and his courage now arose to face facts.  Any misery, rather than be slave to shams!  Any grief to bear, any price to pay, but let him possess his own soul, let him have the truth!

He could not sit in judgment upon himself as an artist only; he had to take himself seriously as a very wealthy man in an hour when very wealthy men stood, so to speak, before the tribunal of the conscience of mankind.  He could not afford to be crushed by the burden of much money.  Neither could he ignore the stern question:  what was he going to do with the Champneys wealth?  He wished that that red-headed woman had taken half of it off his hands!

The Champneys money made him very thoughtful this morning, walking with his hands behind his back, his head bare to the wind.  The water rippled in the sunlight.  Out on the horizon a solitary sail glimmered.  The semicircle of village houses resembled the white beads of a broken necklace, lying exactly where they’d fallen.  He turned a small headland, and the village vanished.

He had a pleasant sense of being alone with this rocky coast, with its salty-sweet wind, its blue water, its limitless sky, from which poured a flood of clear, pale golden sunlight.  And then, as if out of the heart of them all, came a figure immensely alive, the light focusing upon her as if she were the true meaning of the picture in which she appeared; as if this background were not accidental, but had been chosen and arranged for her with delicate and deliberate care.

He thought he had never seen any woman’s body so superbly free in its movement:  she had the grace of a birch stirred by a spring wind.  The poise of her shoulders, the sweep of her garments blown by the sea-breeze, the joyous and vigorous grace of her whole attitude, reminded him of the winged Victory.  So might that splendid vision have walked upon the glad Greek coast in the bright light of the world’s morning.

The woman walked swiftly, lightly, her head held high, her long loose hair blown about her like flame.  Where the rough path narrowed between two large boulders, he had paused to allow her to pass; and so they came face to face, he the taller by a head.  She lifted her cool, gray-green eyes that had in them the silvery sparkle of the sea, and met his golden gaze.  Her face framed in her flaming mane was warmly pale, the brow thoughtful, the mouth virginal.  For a long moment they regarded each other steadily, wonderingly; and in that single moment the eternal miracle occurred by which life and the face of the world changed for them.