ought with a queer shock, was a
woman's mouth so soft, so sweet, so vibrant? He hadn't known. And was he
kissing her? And how had it happened? It was impossible!... Or was he
dreaming?... Or was he--was he dead?...

She released herself from him for an instant, putting her hands on his
shoulders, her eyes looking into his eyes....

"What is your name?"

"Campbell. Shane Campbell."

"Campbell. Shane Campbell. Shane--Shane Campbell. Mine is
Claire-Anne--Claire-Anne Godey."

Section 6

It seemed to him as he went to Les Bains that next evening that the
world had somehow changed into another dimension, so much clearer the
air was, so much brighter the stars.... He had discovered a higher, more
rarefied stratum of life, in the dim, keen atmosphere of which things
took on incomparable beauty and mystery, so that the water on his left
hand, unseen, yet so blue, was not the Gulf of Lyons, but the whole
Mediterranean, which washed Genoa and Naples and Sicily, and the little
islands of the Greeks, and the barbaric shores of Africa, Morocco, and
Algiers; and Gibraltar, where the English were, like an armed sentry in
a turret. The ships in the harbor were not ships of commerce, but
stately entities, each whispering to each in the _shush-shush_ of water
and wind, telling of the voyages they had made, adventurous as
sturgeons. Even from the mud-and-rush huts along the sea-shore came the
note of brave romance. And the softly singing trees! And in the great
amphitheater of the woods no longer the shade of Pontius Pilate gnawed
his bitten nails, but more gallant presences were, gray-eyed Greek
women, with proud composed faces and eloquent hands, and Saracens calmly
awaiting the morrow's battle, and troubadours puzzling keenly for a
rime.... They were not colored thoughts, but sentient presences. Spirit
and thought had united in him into a being like a bird, leaving the
earth, and flying into a realm of ancient forgotten beauty, spirit being
the will, and thought the vibrating wing.... How harmonious everything
was, the stars, the earth, the sea, the people! How clear it had all
become! How one!...

He came to her in her garden where she sat beneath a tree. Around, the
cicadas whirred in the speaking trees. _Zig-zig-zig-zig._ But they were
no longer strident. They seemed but a vibration of the high atmosphere
in which he was....

"Claire-Anne! Claire-Anne...."

"Yes ... yes, lover...."

"Claire-Anne!"

She stood up as h