at ice islands towered and glistened in
the sun. He lay on a coral beach where the cocoanuts grew down to the
mellow-sounding surf. The hulk of an ancient wreck burned with blue
fires, in the light of which danced the hula dancers to the barbaric love-
calls of the singers, who chanted to tinkling ukuleles and rumbling tom-
toms. It was a sensuous, tropic night. In the background a volcano
crater was silhouetted against the stars. Overhead drifted a pale
crescent moon, and the Southern Cross burned low in the sky.

He was a harp; all life that he had known and that was his consciousness
was the strings; and the flood of music was a wind that poured against
those strings and set them vibrating with memories and dreams. He did
not merely feel. Sensation invested itself in form and color and
radiance, and what his imagination dared, it objectified in some
sublimated and magic way. Past, present, and future mingled; and he went
on oscillating across the broad, warm world, through high adventure and
noble deeds to Her--ay, and with her, winning her, his arm about her, and
carrying her on in flight through the empery of his mind.

And she, glancing at him across her shoulder, saw something of all this
in his face. It was a transfigured face, with great shining eyes that
gazed beyond the veil of sound and saw behind it the leap and pulse of
life and the gigantic phantoms of the spirit. She was startled. The
raw, stumbling lout was gone. The ill-fitting clothes, battered hands,
and sunburned face remained; but these seemed the prison-bars through
which she saw a great soul looking forth, inarticulate and dumb because
of those feeble lips that would not give it speech. Only for a flashing
moment did she see this, then she saw the lout returned, and she laughed
at the whim of her fancy. But the impression of that fleeting glimpse
lingered, and when the time came for him to beat a stumbling retreat and
go, she lent him the volume of Swinburne, and another of Browning--she
was studying Browning in one of her English courses. He seemed such a
boy, as he stood blushing and stammering his thanks, that a wave of pity,
maternal in its prompting, welled up in her. She did not remember the
lout, nor the imprisoned soul, nor the man who had stared at her in all
masculineness and delighted and frightened her. She saw before her only
a boy, who was shaking her hand with a hand so calloused that it felt
like a nutmeg-grater a