curiously undeveloped; was it, perhaps, her heart? That would be like a mermaiden. She was no Circe, I mused, guilefully weaving subtle spells. She was an otherwise mature woman who had somehow remained essentially innocent and child-hearted, singing still to herself, in her "secret garden," the songs of seventeen. She herself did not know, she could not know, what strains of richer harmony had been lost to her ears—and to mine, because we had never emerged from the walled garden, had not dared to venture together into the "dark forest" of experience. She herself was an undeveloped theme, a divine fragment of melody, which the winds hummed and the sea sang, and which hovered all days and all nights in the tenebrous deeps of my enchanted heart.
"Look up now," said Cornelia softly.
I wriggled back from the verge of the bluff, and sat up, and looked up.
While I had been lying there in prone contemplation of the goldfish, the awaited sunset had arrived, and with a magnificence of splendor unparalleled in my memory. The sun itself was not visible. But the dull gray curtain, which, as we were descending the mesa, hung from the zenith to the sea, had vanished before the passion-