As she stood watching him, she saw him pause, looking towards her, then leap from the raft and come paddling down stream. He had evidently seen her waiting on the landing-stage, and thought she wanted him; so she shook her head and began to walk back to the house. As she did so an orange caught her eye under a tree, whence it had fallen from sheer red-gold ripeness, and, knowing how Mrs. Campbell mourned a single loss, she gathered it up and took it with her. Back in her own room, she began to pin her bunch of blossoms in her cap hurriedly, for she had lingered longer in the garden than she had intended, and there was a chance, only a chance, that those much to be envied Church-militants might return and claim her attention. Still, hurried as she was, she knelt down beside the bed for a moment or two, and, with her clasped hands laid almost caressingly among the soft muslin, prayed that she might wear this symbol of her entry into a new profession worthily. So, scarcely looking at herself in the glass which, indeed, was too small to show her more than a rather pale face smiling under a quaint little cap, she dressed hastily. Her aunt would be able to tell her if there was anything wrong in the lighter rooms below; here, under the roof, it was already a little dark. Then catching up the orange, she ran downstairs, wondering if the bridal blossoms always smelt so overpoweringly strong, and thinking that, if it was so, they must make the trying ceremony still more trying to one who disliked to have strong scents about them, as she did. Her aunt was not to be seen in the dining room, so Erda parted the heavy curtains which, in Indian fashion, divided it from the drawing-room, and looked in to see if she were there. It was at all times a dark room, especially in late afternoon, as now; but the light from behind her sent a shaft straight to the pier glass which stood--the joy of Mrs. Campbell's heart--just opposite the curtains; so making--as the good lady used fondly to say--the room look much larger than it really was to those entering it. But what the girl saw in it to-day was no illusory enlargement of actualities, no idealization of fact. It was something real, something not to be explained away, exaggerated, or minimized. It was a woman, tall, slender, robed in white; a woman with red-gold hair, edged by the light behind her; a woman with a red-gold apple in her hand. She stood arrested before herself; helpless before the memory of a voice-- "All straight folds--the sunshine on your hair, and a red-gold apple in your hand--the World's Desire!" And she had refused him _his_. She stood for a second, not thinking at all; simply, with a rush, feeling the truth, feeling herself.