In a few more weeks Marie was at home again at Pierre Island, among the rocks and bluffs of Minas Basin. What a loveliness was there in the warm reflections of the sky on the long, bare beaches at low tide. Out along the fringe of the flats she walked as a girl, seeing the beauty of things and places, and feeling the joy of life amid the scenes and objects which before had not so attracted her attention. Her ears were filled with glad sounds. They spoke of the long, lazy fall of the low-tide surf. It sighed through the salmon weir, and overhead soughed in the foliage of the stunted pines, and among the caves and coves of Pierre Island, echoed back with weird loudness from the face of the cliffs. How fresh and clean the breeze came, fanning her face, from the salt tides and briny pools of weed! Where the sand and finer stone had been laid step above step, showing each change of the tide, she walked along the last tide line and marked the gatherings of the sea laid upon the shore. It was all so delightfully real to her now, since she had been away from it so long, and had grown so far into a new life while away. Never before in her absence had she felt the same joy on her return. She was not given to idle dreaming, but she was living in a new life of fresh, maturer years, and she saw the world of her youth, her beautiful world, through the eyes of her love. It tinted everything. She had become a poet in fancy and perception, in the emotional intensity and expansion of her being. Her education and development gave her an intelligent appreciation of the higher poetic qualities of life around her now, and of her place in it. There was suggestion in it, rich thought, and her love crowned it all.
So Marie brought back to Pierre Island a quality she had never before known or seen in it. She did not realize that it came from herself, and that her changed personality had given of itself to every commonplace object. Nor did she know that the strange thrills which came to her in the play of light and color, of harmonious sound upon her sensibilities, were given life and received their peculiar character from the influences of her love and the expectation of the return of Winslow.