Moths by Ouida — page 29: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

" MOTHS. 25 sionate music rose into the air, bursting upon the silence and into the sunlight, and seeming to pierce the very heavens, then sinking low and sweet and soft as any lover’s sigh of joy, break- ng off at last abruptly and leaving nothing but the murmur of e sea. The girl drew a great breathless cry, as if something beautiful rere dead, and stood quite still, her figure mirrored in the shal Ows. : ‘The singer came round from the projecting ledge of the brown cliffs, uncovered his head and bowed low, with apology for un- witting intrusion on her solitude. It was he whom Adrienne had called le philtre @amour. Then the girl, who had been in heaven, dropped to earth, and remembered her wet and naked feet, and glanced down on them om shame, and colored as rosy-red as the sea-flowers in the ol. She threw an eager glance over the sands. Alas! she had for- gotten her shoes and stockings, and the place where they had been knew them no more; the waves had rippled over them and were tossing them, Heaven could tell how near or far away. The ‘‘sad leaden humanity,” which drags us all to earth, brought her from the trance of ecstasy to the very humblest prose of shame and need. ‘*T have lost them,” she murmured, and then felt herself grow from rose to scarlet, as the singer stood on the other side of the pool gazing at her and seeing her dilemma with amusement. ‘* Your shoes and stockings, mademoiselle?” He was so used to seeing pretty nude feet at Trouville that it was impossible for him to measure the awful character of the calamity in the eyes of Vere. ‘ ‘Yes, I took them off; and I never dreamt that any one was ere.” ‘‘Perhaps you have only forgotten where you put them. Let me have the honor to look for your lost treasures.” , Vere stood in her shallow, among the ribbon-weed, with her head hung down, and the color burning in her face. All her pride, of which she had much, could not avail her here. She was nervously ashamed and unhappy. The new-comer searched ardently and indefatigably, leaving no nook of rock or little deposit of sea-water unexamined. He waded in many places, and turned over the weed in all, but it ‘was in vain. The sea was many an inch deeper over the shore than when she had first come, and her shoes and hose were doubtless drifting loose upon the waves; there was no trace of them. Unconscious of this tragedy enacting, Keziah sat in the calm distance, a gray and brown figure, facing the horizon. Vere stood all the while motionless, the sweet singing seeming still to throb and thrill through the air around, and the sunny daylight seeming to go round her in an amber mist, through which she only saw her own two naked feet, still covered, in some sort, by the water and the weeds. ‘They are gone, mademciselle!” said the singer, coming to her — (E(@) mm (@ 00 SS (E(@)