"It seems so extraordinarily--far away," said Hugh Finlay,
of Bross, Dumfries, at length.
"But it will come near," Advena replied.
"I don't think it ever can."
She looked at him with a sudden leap of the heart, a
wild, sweet dismay.
"They, of course, will come. But the life of which they
are a part, and the man whom I remember to have been
me--there is a gulf fixed--"
"It is only the Atlantic," Advena said. She had recovered
her vision; in spite of the stone in her breast she could
look. The weight and the hurt she would reckon with later.
What was there, after all, to do? Meanwhile she could
look, and already she saw with passion what had only
begun to form itself in his consciousness, his strange,
ironical, pitiful plight.
He shook his head. "It is not marked in any geography,"
he said, and gave her a troubled smile. "How can I make
it clear to you? I have come here into a new world, of
interests unknown and scope unguessed before. I know what
you would say, but you have no way of learning the beauty
and charm of mere vitality--you have always been so alive.
One finds a physical freedom in which one's very soul
seems to expand; one hears the happiest calls of fancy.
And the most wonderful, most delightful thing of all is
to discover that one is oneself, strangely enough, able
to respond--"
The words reached the woman beside him like some cool
dropping balm, healing, inconceivably precious.
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