For such is man, and so do the rose petals of love first unclose.
Mona Hutton was, as Winn instinctively felt that Sunday when he first glanced into her well-like eyes, a girl but little akin to her surroundings--a child of the island, full of strange moods and fancies, sombre as the thickets of spruce that grew dense and dark between the ledges of granite, and solemn as the unceasing boom of ocean billows below its cliffs. Even as a barefoot schoolgirl she had found the sea an enticing playmate, and to watch its white-crested waves lifting the rockweed and brown kelpie, as they swept over the rocks and into the gorges and fissures, was of more interest than her schoolmates. She would hide between the ledges and watch the sea-gulls sailing over them for hours, build playhouses in out-of-the-way spots with lone contentment, filling them with shells, starfish, and crabs, dig wells in the sandy margin of the harbor, and catch minnows to put in them. She loved to watch the fishing boats sailing away, the coasters pass the island, the current sweeping in and out beneath the old tide mill, and as she grew up and gained in courage roamed over the entire island at will. The Devil's Oven, out of sight and sound of everybody, became a charming spot for her; and here she would sit for hours watching the waves leap into the gorge and wondering why they never sounded twice alike. And so on, as she developed, she absorbed the mood of the ocean, its grandeur shaped her thoughts, its mystery tinged her emotion, and its solemnity, like the voice of eternity, gave expression to her eyes.
Companions of her own age she had none, leaving them to play as they chose while she sought solitude, and found contentment on the lonely shores. Uncle Jess only was akin to her, and if she could lead him away as playmate, then was she happy.
With only a limited education, such as the island schools afforded, a scant knowledge of books, since but few ever reached Rockhaven, a love of music that amounted to a passion, no knowledge of the world except that gleaned from Uncle Jess, a deep religious feeling, partially shaped by the "Hardshell" Baptist teachings of the Rev. Jason Bush, and more by the ocean billows that forever thundered against the island shores, she was at twenty a girl to be pitied by those capable of understanding her nature or realizing how incompatible to it was her environment. Of music she knew but little, and that taught her by the genial old soul who, since her babyhood, had been father, uncle, and companion. His constant assistance had been hers through her pinafore days at school; his genial philosophy and keen insight into human impulse had done more to develop her mind afterward than the three R's she mastered there. His gentle hand had taught her the scales on his old brown fiddle, and now that she had reached that mystic line where girlhood ends and womanhood begins, her future was of more concern to him than all else in his life. That she must and would, in the course of human nature, love and marry, he fully expected; that it was like to be a mateship with some of the simple and hard-working fishermen's sons, he expected; and yet, with dread for her far more than any one else, even her mother, he realized that such an alliance would be but a lifelong slavery for Mona. To mate a poetic soul like hers, that heard the voice of eternity in the white-crested billows, the footsteps of angels in the music he drew from his violin, and the whisper of God in the sea winds that murmured through the spruce thickets they visited, as he knew she did, seemed as unnatural as confining one of the white gulls that circled about the island in a coop with the barnyard fowls.