How comforting it was to her, to be allowed to bathe her soul once more in the beauty of this enchanting scene. The unchanging pulse of the surf calmed her as she traced her way along the shore, the moon's ever-changing radiance racing on ahead, casting its loveliness before her in ways she found eternally thrilling, so unearthly and new they seemed each night.
She would breathe the salt sea-fragrance again each night and feel once more the sense of the well-being only it could bring her, comfortable, secure, as she had been as a young child. Here, once again, she could be a child, and forget the awful future she now faced.
It was upon this sandy shore, in the pale moonlight, that she felt herself free to discover once again a part of herself she often felt to have been all but lost; her insights into the human heart then seeming so profound that no episode of existence could escape the scrutiny of her all-revealing gaze. She would scan the clear horizon, watching as the white-foamed wave-tips rolled in -- and, of a sudden, she would seem to somehow comprehend how each discrete part (sand and sky and sea and she) all meshed together to form the just mechanism of the universe's lawful ordering -- rending the veil of mystery about her to reveal a light so calm and beautiful that no heartache, no matter how painful, could ever withstand it.
And upon this evening, her heart was particularly full. It seemed that a new tenant was moving in upon this stretch of the otherwise deserted coast. Leoda had watched through the telescope on the balcony outside her father's study as a steady stream of boxes and furniture were conveyed by what seemed like an endless procession of servants through the heat of that enchanting blue and gold summer afternoon, only to hide them deep within the villa's mysterious cool confines.
And suddenly she had glimpsed the figure of a handsome young man, who conducted this vast enterprise with the calm authority of one born to command -- a figure of such embodied glory and grace one felt that, upon completion of his appointed task, he would at once sprout wings and ascend again into the heavens from which he had surely sprung.
It was while in such a state of rapturous awe and anticipation that her father, unobserved, had come upon her. The study door stood carelessly open. He stopped just within its open frame. He stood and silently considered this -- his only child.
How lovely she is ... just like her mother -- may she rest -- in peace....
And in the flames of inner vision he saw consumed before him the wonderful, marvelous years they had spent together -- the endless, joyous sacrifices they had laid upon the altar of their love; reverent, impassioned sacrifices where they had, each to each, revealed to each other their naked souls; rising refreshed, renewed, re-created again in the ashes of each fiery encounter -- he saw it all before him, dissolved now in an ocean of bitter tears. Oh, Emily, how could you leave me? How how you leave me alone?
Death had taken her from him and now he laughed bitterly, in secret sorrow, at the hollow mockery that life had become for him. All that remained him now was this child, this bitter-sweet legacy of what should have been, yes, should have been, an endless love -- this, his only child; a daughter so much like her mother that he longed to rush to her, to crush her in his arms, to never let her go, for he was so afraid of losing her, as he had lost her mother, and he couldn't bear to lose her -- or any part of her -- in any way, ever again.
Instead, he only called her name, hoping against hope that she would come to him. But no, she only, of course, jumped back, startled, and clutched a delicate hand to her ripening bosom. And she stared at him, stared at him with those sky-blue eyes of her's that were so much like her mother's -- stared at him as if he were a stranger and she were seeing him only now for the first, frightening time.
"What were you doing just now?" he asked."Nothing, just ... just watching the new neighbors, they're moving in right now, and you can see -- "
He pushed past her and swung the telescope upon the scene and saw what she had seen. A crimson rage arose within him, a rage to think that anyone had dared invade his privacy -- no, not now, not with The Work so near completion! But, above all, beyond his rage, was fear -- fear that, once again, they had come to take his Emil-- his Leoda away from him.
He swung about and faced his daughter, she already cowering before him. He raged at her, accusing her of heedless things; commanding her to never meet these strangers, ordering her to her room, forbidding her to leave it until he her gave his permission.
Leoda fled the room in tears. But, as she ran, she found no bitterness in her heart, no bitterness at all -- she found nothing but the futile, crushed hope that her mother might still have been alive, that she could have been here to reconcile father and daughter to each other as she had reconciled them so many, many times before. But no, that was never, never to be again. It was then, more than ever, that Leoda longed for the comfort and solitude she had come to find upon the beach.