“Tie the horses,” she said; and Thorpe led them to a tree some yards away.
Nina stood with her back to him, her hands hanging listlessly at her sides, looking downward. Thorpe, after he had tethered the horses, paused also.
The world below was gone. In its place was a vast ocean of frothy milk-white fog. On each side, melting into the horizon in front, until it washed the slopes of the Contra Costa range, lay this illimitable ocean pillowed lightly on sleeping millions. Now calm and peaceful, now distorted in frozen wrath, it was so shadowy, so unreal, that a puff of wind might have blown it to the stars. Out of it rose the hill-tops, bare weather-beaten islands. Against them the sea had hurled itself, then clung, powerless to retreat. Upon some it had cast its spray half way to the crest, over others it rushed in mighty motionless torrents; here and there it but half concealed the jagged points of ugly rocks. Beating against solitary reefs were huge, still, angry breakers, sounding no roar. A terrible death-arrested storm was there in mid-ocean,—a storm which appalled by its very silent wrath. On one of the highest and barest of the crags an old building looked, in that sunless light, like a castle in ruin. Above, the cold blue sky was thickly set with shivering stars. The grinning moon hung low.
There was not a sound; not a living creature was awake but themselves. They might have been in the shadowy hereafter, with all space about them; in the twilight of eternity. Where they rested, the air was clear as a polar noon; not a stray wreath of that idle froth floated about them.
“I came here,” said Nina, turning to Thorpe, “because I knew it would be like this. It will be easier to hear what you think of me, than it would have been down there.”
He brought his hands down on her shoulders, gripping them as if possessed of the instinct to hurt.
“Once or twice I could have killed you as you spoke,” he said. “I shall marry you and cure you, or go to hell with you. As I feel now, it does not matter much which.”
And then he caught her in his arms and kissed her, with the desire which was consuming him.
“But even you cannot conquer me,” she said to him an hour later. “I shall not marry you until I have conquered myself. I believe now that I can. I got your letter. I very nearly knew that you would say what you have done, after I told you the truth. I won’t marry you, knowing that, in spite of your love, which I do not doubt, at the bottom of your intelligence, you despise me. I have always felt that if I could make a year’s successful fight, I should never fall again. There may be no reason for this belief; but we are more or less controlled by imagination. There is no doubt in my mind on this point. If I win alone, you will respect me again, and love me better.”