"I knew that you came from the sea!" he exclaimed. "And the purple rolling moors! How well I remember them, and longed to write of them. But only these latitudes drive my pen. Indeed, I once tried to write about the heather--the purple twilight--no figment of the poetical fancy, that. The atmosphere at that hour literally is purple."
"When it is purple! But you should see the moors in all their moods as I have done. I rarely missed a day in winter, no matter how wild--I have tramped half a day many a time. And I can assure you that the sea itself cannot look more wild, more terrifying--with the wrack driving overhead, and the rain falling in torrents, and the wind whistling and roaring, and rushing past you as if called by the sea to some frightful tryst, some horrible orgy of the elements, and striving to tear you up and carry you with it. Still--still--perhaps it is as beautiful--then--in its way, as in its season of colour and peace."
"Ah! I knew you would say that." He added in a moment, "You are the only person that has quoted my lines to me that has not embarrassed me painfully. For the moment I felt that you had written them, not I!"
"I often used to feel that I had; all, that is----" The magnet of danger to the curiosity in her feminine soul was irresistible. "All but your ode to the mate whom you never could find."
And then she turned cold, for she remembered the story of the woman who had been his ruin. But he did not pale nor shrink; he merely smiled and his eyes seemed to withdraw still farther away. "Ah! that woman of whom all poets dream. Perhaps we really find her as we invoke her for a bit with the pen." Then he broke off abruptly and looked hard at her, his eyes no longer absent. "You--you----" he began. "Ten years ago----" And then his face flushed so darkly that Anne laughed gaily to cover the cold and horror that gripped her once more.
"Ten years ago? I was only twelve! And now--I am made to feel every day that two-and-twenty is quite old. In three more years I shall be an orthodox old maid. All the women in Bath House intimate that I am already beyond the marriageable age."
"The men do not, I fancy!" The poet spoke with the energy of a man himself. "Besides, I looked--happened to look--through the window of the saloon one night and saw you talking to no less than four gallants."