As he watched her he seemed to be watching not a woman but some fine spirit that struck a silver note in its movement. Like a silver flame in the dusk she appeared to him. There was so much spirit to her that nothing else really mattered. The strain of Highland mysticism in him gave him an uncanny power of seeing people as they were, not as they seemed to the outward eye. He could look at a certain man and say to himself with certainty, "At death that man dies," or at some sweet-faced woman, repressed, waiting, and know, "At death this woman's life begins." He saw Cecily Stanford and said: "This woman endures forever. She lives now and she will live always." And then from the spirit within his eyes went to the body without, as one might look first at some gracious womanhood and be all eyes for her presence, forgetting for the nonce the queenly satins that clothed it. He saw her hair, like a blue cloud. Her eyes he knew. He saw the skilful symmetry of face, a little, longish face with lips half open, eagerly. He sensed the littleness of her figure, the long, firm line from knee to ankle, the small bosom, the loveliness of arms. He saw the firm, sensitive hands. And yet she might have been nothing to him but a gracious memory, as of some splendid day, but that she was whole-heartedly interested in and understood the importance of bridges. Some generous arch, or some line of a writer's might have turned her heart that way once, and set her on that broad masonic road the charm of which endures a lifetime. A book may trouble or a picture inspire one, but those are of the spirit. But a bridge is of spirit and body. One sees the architect, one sees the art, one sees the courage and grandeur and beauty. A history of bridges is a history of the world, of its wars, its commerce, its progress. And the thoughts about it are without end. And she could speak of all that to him. She understood the mystic errand of the builder of bridges, which is to be the servant of unborn men. Old wisdom that had been lost was reborn in her. She could feel why the heads of a great religion should call themselves proudly sovereign pontiffs--pontiff, _pontifex_, builder of bridges. She could understand the reverence that stirred in Highlanders when they crossed a bridge and removed their bonnets. "God bless the builder of the bridge!" their prayer went. She could understand the ideals of an ancient age, when a community of monks called themselves the Pontist Brothers, the _Frères Pontifes_. Modest, white-robed, they built bridges of great fame, they operated ferry-boats, they fed and housed pilgrims. But their greatest care was the building and upkeep of bridges. Before Pius II suppressed them, they built the Pont Saint-Esprit over the Rhone, one of the largest stone bridges in the world; a thousand meters long, it is, with twenty-six great arches. Surely their spirits guard it still!