She did not say to him the ordinary, obvious things a woman says when she meets a man. She held his hand for an instant and looked at him.  
"When I saw the bridge you built at Indian Ford," she told him, "I was afraid to meet you. Afraid I might be disappointed in what you were. You might have been a chunky, merry man who treats his genius as a favorite, halloing to it when needed, proud of it, patronizingly modest. Or you might have been an angular, unsure man, jealous of his talent's fame, comparing it as one compares horses. But you are just you, Simon Lovat, and your bridge is you, and you are your bridge. I 'm blessed to see you this day."
 
As he watched her he seemed to be watching not a woman but some fine spirit that struck a silver note in its movement. Like a silver flame in the dusk she appeared to him. There was so much spirit to her that nothing else really mattered. The strain of Highland mysticism in him gave him an uncanny power of seeing people as they were, not as they seemed to the outward eye. He could look at a certain man and say to himself with certainty, "At death that man dies," or at some sweet-faced woman, repressed, waiting, and know, "At death this woman's life begins." He saw Cecily Stanford and said: "This woman endures forever. She lives now and she will live always."
 
And then from the spirit within his eyes went to the body without, as one might look first at some gracious womanhood and be all eyes for her presence, forgetting for the nonce the queenly satins that clothed it. He saw her hair, like a blue cloud. Her eyes he knew. He saw the skilful symmetry of face, a little, longish face with lips half open, eagerly. He sensed the littleness of her figure, the long, firm line from knee to ankle, the small bosom, the loveliness of arms. He saw the firm, sensitive hands.
 
And yet she might have been nothing to him but a gracious memory, as of some splendid day, but that she was whole-heartedly interested in and understood the importance of bridges. Some generous arch, or some line of a wri............