They talked of many things, as lovers do in those intervals between the end of one whirlwind and the half-feared, half-longed-for beginning of another. He told her that the Poet’s Club, after a mighty battle which had threatened disruption, had formally elected him a member. Word had been sent to his rooms late in the afternoon. Then he told her that they were to be married on Thursday, and to sail for Europe in the early morning on his yacht. He spoke of the places they would visit, the old cities he had loved to roam about alone, where idle talk would have shattered the charm. And he would take her into the heart of nature and teach her to forget that the world of men existed. And the sea—they both loved the sea better than all. He would teach her how every ocean, every river, every stream spoke a language of its own, and told legends that put to shame those of forest and mountain, village and wilderness. They would lie on the sands and listen to the deep, steady voice of the ocean telling the secrets she carried in her stormy heart—secrets that were safe save when some mortal tuned his ear to her tongue. He threw back his head and quoted lingeringly from the divinest words that have ever been written about the sea:
“Mother of loves that are swift to fade,
Mother of mutable winds and hours,
A barren mother, a mother-maid,
Cold and clean as her faint, salt flowers.
I would we twain were even as she,
Lost in the night and the light of the sea,
Where faint sounds falter and wan beams wade,
Break and are broken, and shed into showers.
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