“And are you glad to be back here, with me, to-night?”
“To-morrow,” I said dreamily, “we’ll go everywhere where we used to go——”
“Over to that cliff, Nancy——”
“Yes, and finish painting that figure-head——”
“Yes, or not finish painting her. We’ve wasted too much good time at Port Sweetheart as it is!”
But I felt that all our time here had all been so lovely—all! And now, this cool white radiance was bathing the place in a light more magical than any day I had seen. It made of it one of those dream-countries one walks in, half-waking, as a child: a wide and lonely, lovely land; secret, too! of which one would not give the entrance to one’s very dearest; a land I had scarcely dreamed of since I was a half-grown girl. Why did those dreams come back to me now? I stared out to sea; I didn’t want to move or speak; just to be there, watching that moonlight on those waves, was enough. I was as still as that image of that other girl, high up on the cliff....
At that moment I felt ... not myself at all, but outside myself and part of it all—of the quivering, whispering sea under that chill and silver light, of those fairy hills, of the sighing, cool air, and of the dewy earth. There was something of all these in my own being—something of mine in all of them. For that one moment I had forgotten the lover beside me; for just that last rapt moment he was nothing to me....
Then he spoke.
“The lights on the boats down there ... like glow-worms! Only those are putting out to sea. And a glow-worm lights up—did you know why? to guide its mate home.”
I sighed; slowly, slowly growing back again, out of the inhuman white glamour and that silver distance....