nder me and I almost ran along it toward the sanded cottage.
The merest glance at it showed that no one watched there; the windows
were dark. I skirted the rocky wall that protected its back and sides;
no one was stirring in stable or outhouse. On the shore side a
straggling grass stretch ran down to a sheltered, inland bay; a fair
sized vegetable garden, glistening with dew, and a few fruit trees
gave a domestic air to the place, utterly unguessed from the
forbidding sea front. I wandered toward this little bay and sat in a
delightful natural chair of rock to wait for the sunrise.

I must have lost myself for a few minutes, for when I opened my eyes
everything before them was changed, as completely as the scene
shifters change a stage picture. The little bay was crowded with
rolling seas of white, thick mist, like an Alpine lake. Billow on
billow it rolled in, faintly luminous here and there, breaking as
smoke breaks, on the beach. As I stared, lost in the beauty of it, two
great gold arrows from the sun behind me cut into the thickest of it
and tore it like a curtain, and in the rent appeared two human
figures, walking as it might be on clouds to earth. More than mortal
tall they loomed in the mist, and no marbles I have ever seen--not
even that Wonder of Melos--is so immortally lovely as they were. The
woman wore a veil of crimson vine-leaves that wound about her hips and
dropped on one side nearly to her knee, around the man's neck a great
lock of her long hair lay loose and on his head a rough wreath of the
red leaves shone in the arrow of sunlight. Beside them a monstrous
hound appeared suddenly: a trailing vine dripped like blood from his
great jowl.

I could not have told what she looked like to save my life: she was
what the world means when it says woman--beautiful, certainly, but no
one person. One arm was on his shoulder, the other hand lay on the
animal's head; the mist covered their feet and they appeared as
aerial, as unreal as figures in some Assumption. But they were not
through with earth, not they: they were humanity triumphant--the very
crown and flower of creation. They came up from the sea with the
grave, contented smile of the old gods on their faces. Nature, working
patiently at her Saurians, had had this in her mind from the
beginning, and I believed in that moment that God had indeed allowed
her to perfect her last work in His image! For perhaps three
heart-beats I saw them there, framed in t