The decks that had swarmed with excited people were falling silent. Men and women, whose whole lives hung upon what they should find waiting for them yonder, must be in bed betimes, that they might be ready to go ashore in the first boat. Soon only Hildegarde and Cheviot remained. But they were silent, watching all those white sails turn pink against the purple distance—sea and sky alike dyed deep, and still the honey-colored moon hanging there, immense, unreal. Whichever way they looked, this northern world was like something seen in a dream, spectral, uncanny, fitly ushered in by the sunrise in the night.
To Hildegarde, as though given in that hour some gift of prophecy, it seemed that after all her journeying the land she looked on was still beyond the reach of sober day, fated to be for ever outside the experience of waking hours.
Yet this incredible country for two years had been her father’s home!
Louis would go ashore in the first boat and prepare Nathaniel Mar for his daughter’s coming.
“If I were alone I should be imagining he might be dead.” Even as she said “if,” an inward dread clutched at her.
“If you were alone I should be imagining things worse than death.” They drew together. As he held her, looking down into her eyes, a new gravity came into his own. “Are you sure at last?” he said.
“You know I am. But I don’t scold you for asking. It’s the more beautiful of you to have quite realized and yet—yet not despise me for all that romantic feeling about some one I’ve never seen.”
“Your mother once helped me there.”
“My mother! What does she know about—”