It was a leaf of poetry that lay outspread before him, and he read it with a poet’s eye. The faculty of toil, the long labour of the midnight lamp, the fortunate strategy of words, had been denied to Alistair Stuart, and therefore he was not a poet. Remained the gift of wonder and of worship, and by that talisman he still had power to people the sweeping landscape with mysterious life; the Tritons rose and called each other from the waves, old Proteus lifted a slumbering head and listened from his cave, and on the rocks the Sirens sang. He had risen in that happy mood when every little thing becomes a spring of joy. The coffee foaming in its thick white cup, that woke him with its fragrance, and the shell-like bread, were delightful reminders that he had come to a lighter-hearted land. He dressed himself in pearl-grey flannels, and wandered out into the garden with a wide-rimmed panama over his brows, and drank the scent of roses and carnations, intoxicated by all the beauty round him, like a man risen from a sick-bed. His thoughts went back to the life he had just left, and he wondered that he could have lived it for so long. All the dark speculations, the impulses that had moved him to go down into sheol, seemed to have suddenly become as unreal as the imaginary dangers of the night forest are to the traveller coming out on the broad highway at dawn. When the Duchess joined him in the garden walk that overlooked the sea, she gazed on her boy with secret pride. As he stood there in the sunshine, the light breeze playing in his hair, and in his eyes the dawn of joy and hope, he seemed to her mother’s heart a Prince Charming who had only to stretch out his hand and pluck the fairest flower in the garden of love. Alistair found himself too much excited to remain at home waiting for the advent of the Princess. With a lover’s superstition he believed that the way to hasten her coming was to go out himself. He kissed his mother, and went down a rock-hewn stairway at the foot of which a wooden gate let him out on the sands. The little Plage, enclosed between the two headlands which Dinard thrusts out into the sea like a snail’s horns, was bustling like a fair. The French had made a miniature village of the beach, with streets of little huts in which they read, and sewed, and called upon each other, and carried on their family life. Children were burrowing in the sand like rabbits, and bathers clad in the bright hues of butterflies fluttered on the sea’s edge. “And I might live this life always!” Alistair murmured, with a sort of wonder at his own past blundering, as he stepped among this glad throng, as glad as they. Hero came towards him, walking beside her father, dressed in white with one blue flower at her throat and a red flower in her heart. “We were just coming to see you!” she cried gaily. “I could not wait for you, you see!” cried Alistair. And they two looked at each other through the magic casement of love. CHAPTER XVI