He called to her softly. “You did come. I thought you would sleep through.”
She said: “Yes, I came.”
“And in time, too! The best of it is before the sun comes clear of the sea.”
She looked to the east. “How long will that be?”
“Twenty minutes—or maybe half an hour.”
“Then I needn’t have hurried.” She was managing a steady voice. But she was so full of the thing she had discovered yesterday that she could hardly breathe. They moved together to the after rail, where they could look out between the starboard and the stern boats. She caught his eye, once, in a sidewise glance; and he was smiling. Why? She became furiously crimson. He was laughing at her; he had remembered! He thought she had come for that.
He said: “When there’s one low cloud, a dark one, it’s finer. To-day the line of the sea is like the line of a knife’s blade.”
She nodded, looking off to that blue-bronze line against the warming colors of the sky. He was watching her, not the sky. She pointed up to where a star still gleamed; and they saw its cold light wiped out by the warm brush of the coming sun. “You see,” she told him, “your sunrise is death too—death of the stars, and of the night.”
He shook his head. “No; the night is death, and the stars are ghosts. When the sun comes, the night wakes into life, and forgets the stars.”
She said, watching him: “I never heard you talk like that. You are—quiet, when others are around.”