The huge spaces of earth and air and water carried with them a
feeling of kindly but enormous force--elemental force, fresh,
untutored, new, and young. There was buoyancy in it; a fine,
breathless sense of uplifting and exhilaration; a sensation as of
bigness and a return to the homely, human, natural life, to the
primitive old impulses, irresistible, changeless, and unhampered;
old as the ocean, stable as the hills, vast as the unplumbed
depths of the sky.
Condy and Blix sat still, listening, looking, and watching--the
intellect drowsy and numb; the emotions, the senses, all alive and
brimming to the surface. Vaguely they felt the influence of the
moment. Something was preparing for them. From the lowest,
untouched depths in the hearts of each of them something was
rising steadily to consciousness and the light of day. There is
no name for such things, no name for the mystery that spans the
interval between man and woman--the mystery that bears no relation
to their love for each other, but that is something better than
love, and whose coming savors of the miraculous.
The afternoon had waned and the sun had begun to set when Blix
rose.
"We should be going, Condy," she told him.
They started up the hill, and Condy said: "I feel as though I had
been somehow asleep with my eyes wide open. What a glorious
sunset! It seems to me as though I were living double every
minute; and oh! Blix, isn't it the greatest thing in the world to
love each other as we do?"
They had come to the top of the hill by now, and went on across
the open, breezy downs, all starred with blue iris and wild
heliotrope.
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