A young man (on one blind) has just said farewell to his parents on
the steps of the castle and is rowing away down the River of Life.
At the prow of his boat is the figurehead of a winged woman holding
an hour-glass.
Marguerite lay on her side, sleepily contemplating the whole scene
between her thick, bosky lashes. She liked everything but the
winged woman holding the hour-glass. Had she been that woman, she
would have dropped the hour-glass into the blue, burying water, and
have reached up her hand for the young man to draw her into the
boat with him. And she would have taken off her wings and cast
them away upon the hurrying river. To have been alone with him, no
hour-glass, no wings, rowing away on Life's long voyage, past
castles and valleys, and never ending woods and streams! As to the
Celestial City, she would have liked her blinds better if the rains
of her grandmother's youth had washed it away altogether. It was
not the desirable end of such a journey: she did not care to land
_there_.
Marguerite slipped drowsily over to the edge of the bed in order to
be nearer the blinds; and she began to study what was left of the
face of the young man just starting on his adventures from the
house of his fathers. Who was he? Of whom did he cause her to
think? She sat up in bed and propped her face in the palms of her
hands--the April face with its October eyes--and lapsed into what
had been her dreams of the night. The laces of her nightgown
dropped from her wrists to her elbows; the masses of her hair, like
sunlit autumn maize, fell down over her neck and shoulders into the
purity of the bed.
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