It appeared that she had come back to her seat to fetch a little silk bag of the kind that women were then using to carry about their handkerchiefs and purses. She spoke to no one, only leaned over the back of her seat, took her bag and went away, and it was all over in two or three seconds. But in those few seconds a man's life had been changed. The world would never look the same again to Garrett Westenra. Obliged to add to all his scornful opinions of the woman who had sat next to him outraging his ideals, the astounding knowledge that she was the woman of his dreams, the living presentment of the vision that had for years so mystically haunted his life, he was shaken to the Celtic roots of him. He felt as a man feels who has lost something precious and irreplaceable. Something was broken and gone from his life. The beautiful spun-glass globe of illusion he had carried so secretly was shattered in the dust. In that moment of bitter realisation he was not a surgeon and scientist from New York, but a primitive man from Ireland keening in silence for a nameless sorrow. The desert grief of his race welled up from the depths of him, and the taste of his waters was as the taste of the waters of Marah.
————
There were few people on deck. The wind was chill, and the stars burned with the brilliant sapphire pallor of electric light. There was a special spot where Westenra always stood to smoke, because it gave him a leaning place against the rail where he could command the length of the deck, and yet get an uninterrupted view of the grey waves with their pale sea palaces. Close beside him in a canvas-sheltered corner stood his deck chair. He lit a cigar, but he might have been smoking seaweed for all the aroma there was in it for him. Abstractedly he stared at the phosphorescent waves, but his attention was on the door of the companion-way, and presently, as he had felt sure she would, the woman in grey came through it with her swaying movements and her hands put out a little. She had wrapped herself in a long silky cloak that gleamed in the starlight, and as she strayed up and down the deck like a grey ghost, the wind took hold of it and flicked it about her making it crack like a silken sail. It took fronds of her hair too and made them into lashes that beat her face and blew above her head. She laughed a little to herself as she was blown this way and that, and for the first time that night she pleased Westenra, for he loved the wind, and it seemed to him that she loved it too. He stood very still listening to the tap-tapping of her heels, thinking of--
"Dear, were your footsteps fast or slow...?"
and of how long he had listened in office and hospital for the sound of a woman's feet coming towards him. He remembered the bare broken feet of the woman in his dream, though he had always dimly recognised that the mud and blood were symbolical of the rough paths she had walked. These that tapped the deck near him were daintily shod in grey suède, but from her own telling they had strayed in far places of the earth and echoed in lonely spots before they came his way, as they were coming now. Would they halt when they reached him? Resentful, antagonistic, and disillusioned as he was, something in his fatalistic Irish nature responded, some bird sang in a pale green palace when she stood still beside him, and spoke:
"Do you think I might sit in this nice sheltered corner?" She looked at the chair and then at him, with a boyish bon camarade smile that banished all the sadness and shadows from her face.
"I 'm sure you might--please do."
He moved forward swiftly and arranged the chair for her. She sat down, and as he did not move away began to talk to him in the same friendly easy way as she had used to the Jew, and he found himself, like the Jew, answering her if not eagerly at least with interest. However they touched only on generalities. She did not tell him nearly so much as she had told the Jew and he found in that too something to resent. Possibly she missed the French receptivity, or with the quicksilver sensitiveness of some women divined antagonism, for something like a little note of appeal came presently into her voice: it was as though she were trying to soften his heart towards her. In answer to some observation of his with regard to travelling she said rather wearily:
"Yes; one discovers these things when one has knocked about the world long enough."
"Knocking about the world" was not a process that usually enhanced a woman's charm, in his eyes at least; but he soon became aware that all charm was far from being knocked out of this one. Charm came out of her like a perfume, and stole towards him. But he steeled his heart against it and against her, so that a glint of the steel presently came into his eyes and seemed to ring in his voice. Certainly something in him chilled the little tendrils of good fellowship and friendliness that she seemed inclined to extend. At last shivering slightly and drawing her cloak about her, she stirred in her chair, preparing to go. But he stayed her with an odd and unexpected question.