Poor Joanna's
house was gone except the stones of its foundations, and there was
little trace of her flower garden except a single faded sprig of
much-enduring French pinks, which a great bee and a yellow
butterfly were befriending together. I drank at the spring, and
thought that now and then some one would follow me from the busy,
hard-worked, and simple-thoughted countryside of the mainland,
which lay dim and dreamlike in the August haze, as Joanna must have
watched it many a day. There was the world, and here was she with
eternity well begun. In the life of each of us, I said to myself,
there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret
or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and
recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell
to whatever age of history they may belong.
But as I stood alone on the island, in the sea-breeze,
suddenly there came a sound of distant voices; gay voices and
laughter from a pleasure-boat that was going seaward full of boys
and girls.
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