Edmund did not look puzzled; he was deciding no knotty question at this moment.  Nor did he look simply unhappy:  she knew his expression when in sorrow and when in physical pain or mere disgust.  He looked intensely preoccupied and very firm.  Perhaps, she fancied, he too had a deep sense of that passing of life, of something akin in the swift movement of the water passing the yacht and the swift movement of life passing by the individual man.  Was he, perhaps, feeling how life was going for him and for Rose, and by the simple fact of its passing on while they were standing passive their lives would be fixed apart?—­passing, apart from what might have been of joy, of peace, of company along the road?  There are moments when, even without the stimulus of passion, human beings have a sort of guess at the possibilities of helping one another, of giving strength, and gaining sweetness, that are slipping by.  There are many degrees of regret, between that of ships that pass in the night, and that of those who have voyaged long together.  There are passages of pleasure sympathy, and passages of sympathy in fight, and passages of mutual succour, and passages of intercourse when incapacity to help has in itself revealed the intensity of good-will in the watcher.  But whenever the heart has been fuller than its words, and the will has been deeper than its actions, there is this beauty of regret.  There has been a wealth of love greater than could be given or received—­not the love of passion, but the love of the little children of the human race for one another.  This regret is too grave to belong to comedy, and too happy to belong to tragedy.  Rose’s heart was full with this sorrow, if it be a real sorrow.  These are the sorrows of hearts that are too great for the occasions of life, whereas the pain is far more common of the hearts that are not big enough for what life gives them of opportunity.

Rose was oppressed by feelings she could not analyse, a sense of possibilities of what might have been after these perfect weeks together.  But her feelings were dreamy; she had no sense of concrete alternative; she did not now—­he had been too skilful—­expect Edmund to ask her, nor did she wish him to ask her, to draw quite close to him.  She only felt at the end of this interlude they had spent together a suspicion of the infinite reach of the soul, and the soul not rebelling against its bonds, but conscious of them while awaiting freedom.

     “Only I discern infinite passion and the pain
     Of finite hearts that yearn.”

Such were the moments when a man might be pardoned if he called Rose’s beauty angelic—­angelic of the type of Perugino’s pictured angels, a figure just treading on the earth enough to keep up appearances, but whose very skirts float buoyantly in the fresh atmosphere of eternity.  They stood a few paces apart, Rose with her look bent vaguely towards the shore, Edmund, still reading his letters, apparently unaware of her presence.  He was thus able to take a long exposure sun-picture of the white figure on a sensitive memory that would prove but too retentive of the impression.