He walked
with a stick and carried a pair of field-glasses in a case slung over his
shoulder. The field-glasses had become a habit with him, but he rarely used
them, for his small slate-colored eyes were keen.
Once and again John Barron turned to look at St. Michael's Mount, seen afar
across the bay. The magic of morning made it beautiful and the great pile
towered grandly through a sunny haze. No detail disturbed the eye under
this effect of light, and the mount stood vast, dim, golden, magnified and
glorified into a fairy palace of romance built by immortal things in a
night. Seen thus, it even challenged the beholder's admiration, of which he
was at all times sparing. Until that hour, he had found nothing but
laughter for this same mount, likening the spectacle of it, with its castle
and cottages, now to a senile monarch with moth-eaten ermine about his toes
and a lop-sided crown on his head, now to a monstrous sea-snail creeping
shoreward.
Barron, having walked down the hill to Mouse-hole, breasted slowly the
steep acclivity which leads therefrom toward the west. Presently he turned,
where a plateau of grass sloped above the cliffs into a little theater of
banks ablaze with gorse. And here his thoughts and the image they were
concerned with perished before reality. Framed in a halo of golden furze,
her hands making a little penthouse above her brow, and in her blue eyes
the mingled hue of sea and sky, stood a girl looking out at the horizon.
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