And so blinding was the sheen of the lake that it seemed at first as though the sun were about to break from the waters, for there all the radiance of the sunrise was reflected, concentrated.
Looking in this manner from the doorway, with the water on either side and straight ahead, and the dark, narrow point of land cutting that colour like a prow, it seemed to Anthony almost as if he stood on the bridge of a ship which in another moment would gather head and sail out toward the sea of fresh beauty beyond the peaks, for the old house of William Drew stood on a small peninsula, thrusting out into the lake, a low, shelving shore, scattered with trees.
Where the little tongue of land joined the main shore the ground rose abruptly into a shoulder of rocks inaccessible to a horse; the entrance and exit to the house must be on either side of this shoulder hugging closely the edge of the water.
Feeling that halo of the morning about them, for a moment Anthony forgot all things in the lift and exhilaration of the keen air; and he accepted the girl as a full and equal partner in his happiness, looking to her for sympathy.
She knelt by the edge of the water, face and throat shining and wet, her head bending back, her lips parted and smiling.

It thrilled him as if she were singing a silent song which made the brightness of the morning and the colour beyond the peaks.

He almost waited to see her throat quiver--hear the high, sweet tone.
But a scent of telltale sharpness drew him a thousand leagues down and made him whirl with a cry of dismay: "The bacon, Sally!" It was hopelessly burned; some of it was even charred on the bottom of the pan.

Sally, returning on the run, took charge of the cookery and went about it with a speed and ability that kept him silent; which being the ideal mood for a spectator, he watched and found himself learning much.
Whatever that scene of the night before meant in the small and definite, in the large and vague it meant that he had a claim of some sort on Sally Fortune and it is only when a man feels that he has this claim, this proprietorship, as it were, that he begins to see a woman clearly.
Before this his observance has been half blind through prejudice either for or against; he either sees her magnified with adulation, or else the large end of the glass is placed against his eye and she is merely a speck in the distance.

But let a woman step past that mysterious wall which separates the formal from the intimate--only one step--at once she is surrounded by the eyes of a man as if by a thousand spies.