With no picture of her to aid him, he had for long periods been unable to make her face really present to his mind's eye--one of the sources of his painful debates with himself.

When it came, as faces do, at unanticipated moments, he saw her as she looked in walking back with him from the lake-side, when she declared that the taste of the rain was sweet.

Is it not the best of life, that involuntary flash of memory upon instants of the eager past?
Better than present joy, in which there is ever a core of disappointment; better, far better, than hope, which cannot warm without burning.

Annabel was surpassingly beautiful as he knew her in that brief vision.

Beautiful she still was, but it was as if a new type of loveliness had come between her and his admiration; he could regard her without emotion.