We stood tranced in long embraces.
Mixt with kisses sweeter, sweeter,
Than anything on earth.
“A shadow flits before me—
Not thou, but like to thee,
Ah God! that it were possible
For one short hour to see
The souls we loved, that they might tell us
What and where they be.”
When Daintree began, Tom’s eyes had been swimming lazily about the bay; but the first quatrain brought them at a bound to the reader’s face, and now he was hanging upon every word. Line after line rang through him like a trumpet-call—waking old echoes—stirring and stabbing him—until the whole man tingled with the rushing of long-stagnant blood. And now came stanzas that went no deeper than the ear, while those three ran their course through every vein. Yet when he next caught up the thread it was his own soul still speaking—the very story was now his own.
“Alas! for her that met me,
That heard me softly call—
Came glimmering thro’ the laurels
At the quiet even fall,
In the garden by the turrets
Of the old manorial hall.”
He had turned his head: a blue mist hid the world, but through it shone a poignant vision of Claire Harding—among the Winwood fir-trees—in the autumn evenings long ago. … And this is how the tears came back into Tom Erichsen’s eyes, to show him that his soul had lived through a night’s bushranging and four months of Major Honeybone’s iron-gang,
