The sun soon beat down with fiery rays, and I cut for her a leaf of fan palm to form a sort of parasol. The picture she made in her light dress, against the blue sea all filled with glowing brightness, the shade of the graceful leaf falling upon her, will live long in my memory. It seemed to me that her pure soul shone out from the beautiful eyes that now and again met mine. Rare combination of something that seemed straight from heaven with what was sweetly human and of our earth; the clear, pure spirit, and the beautiful woman glowing with health and filled with life and color and made for human love--was there ever before, whispered my tortured heart, such an incomparable being? Dare I speak to her of what fills my mind and soul? No; most certainly not.
Now in point of fact I was making love to this girl with all my might, and did not know it. I wooed her all unconsciously, and had not dared to woo her at all. The divine passion, I have since been told, needs no word or sign; and this girl, divinely pure and yet sweetly human, inexperienced as she was, must have felt that I adored her. If she had never heard of the love of man for woman--and most likely she had never given it a thought--still she must have known my devotion to her quite as well as though the burning words that ever kept throbbing up from my heart for utterance had passed my lips. But I could not know. And so I alternated between the medium plane of faint hope and the cold depths of despair. I conclude, as I now look back, that I was not doing so badly as I then thought.
We sat down on a rock together to watch the little hermit crabs, each with a stolen shell that it had converted into a house, now peering out, now drawing itself in, now dragging its house along the sand in search of food or a better location,--funny little creatures, that seem to link the spider family to the crabs. Her hand was on my arm; we sat close together; the curved, flat edges of the spent waves nearly reached our feet as they stole up the sand; the solemn sound of the sea was in our ears, and the enchanting song of a first love filled my heart.
And then we wandered slowly on along the beach, now and then compelled by a higher flow to step aside; we examined the lovely shells that lay in numbers and great variety bleaching on the margin of the dry sand, or wetted by the rising water; the little skipping sand borers; now and again a gaping clam or hideous sea slug; dry shells of the great horse-shoe crabs; bladder-weed and ocean tangle; and all the wonderful débris that the sea casts up. Then turning in toward the land we came among the tall, graceful stems of the cocoa-palm, their feathery heads trembling and rustling in the gently stirring air. Here we found in a low shrub the little nest of one of those diminutive wagtail wrens, and while the anxious mother fluttered near, feigning a wound or inability to fly in order to draw us away from her precious little ones, we looked at the four tiny, gaping-mouthed children clad in down and naked helplessness, until the distress of the comical little matron induced us to move away from the nest in pity.