‘I know what I will do.’  I said; ’I will fling myself flat on the sands behind the boulder and watch her.  I will observe her without being myself observed.’

I was in the mood when one tries sportfully to deceive one’s self as to the depth and intensity of the emotion within.  Perhaps I would and perhaps I would not speak to her at all that night; but if I did speak, I would say and do what (on that day when I set out for school) I had sworn to say and do.

So there I lay hidden by the boulder and watched her.  She made the circuit of each pool that lay across her path towards the cliffs,—­made it apparently for the childish enjoyment of balancing herself on the stones and snapping her fingers at the dog, who looked on with philosophic indifference at such a frivolous waste of force.  Yes, though a tall girl of seventeen, she was the same incomparable child who had coloured my life and stirred the entire air of my imagination with the breezes of a new heaven.  The voice of the tumbling sea in the distance, the caresses of the tender breeze, the wistful gaze of the great moon overhead, were companionship enough for her—­for her whose loveliness would have enchanted a world.  She had no idea that there was at this moment stepping round those black stones the loveliest woman then upon the earth.  If she had had that idea she would still have been the star of all womanhood, but she would not have been Winifred.  A charm superior to all other women’s charm she still would have had; but she would not have been Winifred.

When she left the rocks and came upon the clear sand, she stopped and looked at her sweet shadow in the moonlight.  Then, with the self-pleasing playfulness of a kitten, she stood and put herself into all kinds of postures to see what varying silhouettes they would make on the hard and polished sand (that shone with a soft lustre like satin); now throwing up one arm, now another, and at last making a pirouette, twirling her shawl round, trying to keep it in a horizontal position by the rapidity of her movements.

The interest of the philosophic Snap was aroused at last.  He began wheeling and barking round her, tearing up the sand as he went like a little whirlwind.  This induced Winifred to redouble her gymnastic exertions.  She twirled round with the velocity of an engine wheel.  At last, finding the enjoyment it gave to Snap, she changed the performance by taking off her hat, flinging it high in the air, catching it, flinging it up again and again, while the moving shadow it made was hunted along the sand by Snap with a volley of deafening barks.  By this time she had got close to me, but she was too busy to see me.  Then she began to dance—­the very same dance with which she used to entertain me in those happy days.  I advanced from my stone, dodging and slipping behind her, unobserved even by Snap, so intent were these two friends upon this entertainment, got up, one would think, for whatsoever sylphs or gnomes or water sprites might be looking on.