The romance of consecration has its glamour as well as the romance of love. Bayard had felt his way into this beautiful mist with a stout, good sense which is rare in the devotee, and which was perhaps his most remarkable quality. This led him to accept without fruitless resistance a lot which was pathetically alien to him. He was no gray-bearded saint, on whose leathern tongue joy had turned to ashes; to whom renunciation was the last throw left in the game of life. He was a young man, ardent, eager, buoyant, confiding in hope because he had not tested it; believing in happiness because he had not known it: full of untried, untamed capacity for human delight, and with the instinct (generations old) of a luxurious training toward human ease. He had cut the silken cords between himself and the world of his old habits, ambitions, and friends with a steady stroke; he had smitten the soft network like a man, and flung it from him like a spirit; but there were hours when he felt as if he were bleeding to death, inwardly, from sheer desolation. “That call of George Fenton’s upset me last night,” he said aloud, as he sank down at the base of a big boulder in the warm sand. He sometimes talked to the sea; nothing else in Windover could understand him; he was acquiring some of the habits of lonely people who live apart from their own class. How impossible it would have been in Cambridge, in Boston, or in Cesarea to be caught talking aloud! His pale face flushed, and he drew his hat over it, thanking Heaven that rocks were deaf and the downs were dumb, that the sun would never tell, and the harbor was too busy to listen. He had lain there in the sand for some time, as motionless as a mollusk at low water. “All a man needs is a little common rest,” he thought. The April sun seemed to sink into his brain and heart with the healing touch that nothing human ever gives. He pushed his hat away from his face, and looked up gratefully, as if he had been caressed. As he did so, he heard footsteps upon the crisp, red-cupped moss that surrounded the base of the boulder. He rose instinctively, and confronted a woman--a lady. She had been walking far and fast, and had glorious color. The skirt of her purple gown was splashed with little sticks and burrs and bits of moss; her hands were full of saxifrage. She was trying in the rising wind to hold a sun-umbrella over her head, for she wore the street or traveling dress of the town, and her little bonnet gave her as much protection from the sun as a purple butterfly whose wings were dashed with gold. Oddly enough, he recognized the costume before he did the wearer; so incredible did he find it that she should stand there living, glowing, laughing,--a sumptuous beauty, stamped against the ascetic sky of Windover. “_You!_” he cried.