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Long stood Beltane where she had left him, the soft shadows of night deepening about him, dreaming ever of her beauty, of her wondrous hair, and of the little foot that had peeped forth at him 'neath her habit, and, full of these thoughts, for once he was deaf to the soft voices of the trees nor heard the merry chatter of the brook.
After making the usual arrangements that are vaguely called "establishing touch," he turned back out of the shelter of the parapet, over the dangerous ground. Twilight was deepening every second. He did not run; and he only hurried, because he wanted to get really established in his "funk hole" before it grew too dark to see what he was doing.
To the Italian mind, at all events, nature had by this time lost its taint of sin, and had shaken off all trace of demoniacal powers. Saint Francis of Assisi, in his Hymn to the Sun, frankly praises the Lord for creating the heavenly bodies and the four elements. But the unmistakable proofs of a deepening effect of nature on the human spirit begin with Dante.
He loomed about the place, a big, stoop-shouldered, gaunt man, with tragic gray face and melancholy eyes and deepening wrinkles. All the tragedy and pathos and struggle of the strike were marked upon his features. His face summed up the sorrows of the thirty thousand. Myra sometimes expected him to collapse utterly.
The tops of the more distant mountains were glowing in purple and gold, and the blue of the sky was deepening. In that brief hour before the utter darkness that follows sunset the desert has a rare beauty. It has lights and shades denied to softer landscapes. Titania's bower can show no more brilliant color effects.
Then, the barricades having been built, the posts assigned, the guns loaded, the sentinels stationed, they waited, alone in those redoubtable streets through which no one passed any longer, surrounded by those dumb houses which seemed dead and in which no human movement palpitated, enveloped in the deepening shades of twilight which was drawing on, in the midst of that silence through which something could be felt advancing, and which had about it something tragic and terrifying, isolated, armed, determined, and tranquil.
But there is one simple and sufficing example, which is here more to my purpose, and is at least equally sufficient for it. And that is the deepening national difference between the Americans and the English. Let me test it first by my individual experience in the matter of literature. I did not think of it as an American book, but simply as a book.
For once he could not see his way clear. Should he tell her half the truth, and throw himself on her mercy? Should he make love to her? Or what should he do? One thing he saw clear enough: he must not quit the field. Sooner or later, all would depend on his presence, his tact, and his ready wit. He felt like a man who could not swim, and wades in deepening water.
The Friends used the sand, but condemned the figures as savoring of the world. As Primrose stood there she was grace itself. Her head was full of loose curls that glinted of silver in the high lights and a touch of gold in the shade, deepening to a soft brown.
If there is pathos as well as humour, and deepening the humour, in the figure of the distraught knight-errant talking so hopelessly over the head of his attached squire's morality, so too there is pathos, giving depth to the humour of the eccentric philosopher, shooting so hopelessly wide of the intellectual appreciation of the most affectionate of brothers.
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