When she reached her room again, she couldn’t sleep, but knelt by her window and watched the skies pale and then flush like a young girl’s face, and the morning-star blaze and pale, and the sun come up over a bright and beautiful world in which she herself was, she felt, new-born.  Far in the background of things, unreal as a dream, hovered the unlovely figure of Nancy Simms, and nearer, but still almost as unreal, the bright, cold figure of Anne Champneys, that Anne Champneys who had wished to marry Berkeley Hayden to gratify pride and ambition.  The woman kneeling by the window, watching the glory of the morning, looked back upon those two as a winged butterfly might remember its caterpillar crawlings.

All that glittering life Anne Champneys had planned for herself?  Swept away as if it had been a bit of tinsel!  Money?  Position?  She laughed low to herself.  She didn’t care whether her man had possessions or lacked them.  All she asked was that he should be himself—­and hers.  All that Milly had been to Chadwick Champneys—­the passionate lover, the perfect comrade, the friend nothing daunted, no wind of fortune could change—­Anne could be, would be to Pierre.

There was but one shadow upon her new happiness:  she hated to disappoint Marcia.  Marcia had set her heart upon the Hayden marriage.  It was toward that consummation, so devoutly to be hoped, that Marcia had planned.  And just when that plan was nearing perfection Anne was going to have to frustrate it.  She hated to hurt Hayden himself, and the thought of his angry disappointment was painful to her.  She liked Hayden.  She would always like him.  But she couldn’t marry him.  To marry Hayden, loving Pierre, would have been to work them both an irremediable injury.  A sort of horror of what she had been about to do came upon her.  The bare thought of it made her recoil.

Her native shrewdness told her that Hayden’s immense pride would come to his aid.  The fact that she had dared to desire somebody else, to prefer another to his lordly self would be enough to prove to Hayden that she wasn’t worthy of his affections.  He would feel that he had been deceived in her.  She couldn’t help hoping that he wouldn’t altogether despise her.  She hoped that Marcia wouldn’t be too angry to forgive her.  And then her thoughts merged into a prayer:  Oh dear God, help her to make Pierre happy, to grow to his stature, to be worthy of him!

* * * * *

Back there on the beach he lay with his head in his arms, humble before the power and the glory that had come to him.  This, this was the face he had always sought, the beauty that had so long eluded him!  Beauty, mere physical beauty, appealed to him as it always appeals to an artist, but it had never had the power to hold him for any length of time.  It had palled upon him.  To satisfy his demand, beauty must have upon it the ineffable imprint of the soul.  This woman’s face was as baffling, as inexplicable, in its way, as was Mona Lisa’s.  One wasn’t sure that she was beautiful; one was only sure that she was unforgetable, and that after other faces had faded from the memory, hers remained to haunt the heart.  And that red hair of hers, like the hair of a Norse sun-goddess!