The Argosy — page 348: what you’re looking at

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

Between the Songs. 329 unutterably charming—ah, here it was—here it was as she had ever pictured it; with its plenitude of downy ottomans, magnificent in mellow tinted silk and faded roses, and its faint sweet scent of Eastern spices. The window looked out on a little garden, and beyond that over a grand expanse of sea. ‘The waves were flying hither and thither, and tossing and leaping in the moonlight ; almost phantom-like in their quick silvery brilliance. Louder than in any other part of the house one heard here the boom and thud on the shore ; and mingling with that, in an odd drowsy fashion, there was a continual low-toned sighing sound, in two distinct keys—murmuring about the window. She seemed to become perfectly rigid for a minute as she listened ¢o it: the pupils of her large dark eyes dilated, her lips parched. A vague conviction that had always been in her mind now intensified to certainty: that had it not been for this dreamily-chanting window, this weird view of the waves, these mysteriously-scented ottomans— had it not been, in a word, for this room, she would not have been herself, with her own powers, own passions, own sentiments. Remembering the past twenty years, it was little wonder that she was, in a dazed sort of way, trying to understand whether she was glad or sorry that there had ever been this room—and through the vague wandering she was all the time sitting once more in recollec- tion, just as she had actually sat hundreds of times, young, enthusiastic with belief and hope in everything worth believing and hoping in, side by side on the dreamy window-seat with Oliver. The expression in her eyes suddenly changed to one of flaming anger, as she remembered how persistently it had been maintained to her—that Oliver had been the first to forget her. She had always known—and yet never perhaps so certainly as now, the sickening falseness of that. They might have misrepresented her to him; they might—oh, heaven—have turned him against her. But Oliver could not have forgotten her; oh, Oliver could never have forgotten her. She pressed her lips tenderly to the window-seat, and turned . away with all the late passion in her eyes subdued into intense sadness. Then, going over to the mantelpiece, she took her stand thoughtfully before it. She had stood just here, with her elbow resting just like this upon the marble, on that evening. She had been in the habit of standing in that position, a trick probably caught from her father, and had fallen into it unconsciously then; with her father on the other side of the hearth-rug, pitiless and uncompromising, commanding her to decide on the moment the future course of her whole life, whether it was to be in this way or that way; her brothers watching awe-struck from different parts of the room. How well she remembered! One by one the figures seemed to stand out before her in the gloom. These were the exact facts of the case: it was easy to recall them. GOMIIG oOo (SO