Far away the sea was lapping gently and monotonously on the bar.

The wind of evening in the poplars sounded like some sad, weird, old rune--some broken dream of old memories.

A slender shapely young aspen rose up before them against the fine maize and emerald and paling rose of the western sky, which brought out every leaf and twig in dark, tremulous, elfin loveliness.
"Isn't that beautiful ?" said Owen, pointing to it with the air of a man who puts a certain conversation behind him.
"It's so beautiful that it hurts me," said Anne softly.

"Perfect things like that always did hurt me--I remember I called it 'the queer ache' when I was a child.

What is the reason that pain like this seems inseparable from perfection?
Is it the pain of finality--when we realise that there can be nothing beyond but retrogression ?" "Perhaps," said Owen dreamily, "it is the prisoned infinite in us calling out to its kindred infinite as expressed in that visible perfection." "You seem to have a cold in the head.