For, if remembrance of her remained with him,
and that agreeably, she herself also found "Passage to India" in a sense.
And this idea, recondite though it was, touched and charmed her fancy--or
would have done so but for the recollection of her deplorable
flight.--Oh! what--what made her run away? From what had she thus run? If
she could only find out! And find, moreover, the cause sufficient to
palliate, to some extent at least, the woefulness of her cowardice.
But at this point her meditation suffered interruption. The three
cormorants, having finished their sun-bath, rose from the sand and
flapped off, flying low and sullenly in single file over the sea parallel
with the eastward-trending coast-line.
With the departure of the great birds her surroundings seemed to lose
their only element of active and conscious life. The brooding sunlit
evening became oppressive, so that in the space of a moment Damaris
passed from solitude, which is stimulating, to loneliness, which is only
sad. Meanwhile the shadow cast by the ilex trees had grown sensibly
longer, softer in outline, more transparent and finely intangible in
tone, and the reek of the mud-flats more potent, according to its habit
at sundown and low tide.
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