Those birds floating here around the Sea Flower so quietly on the swell of the sea looked as happy as they were pure and lovely. No whiteness, hardly even snow itself, could rival the whiteness of their chests, while under them their pink legs and feet looked like little twigs of coral.
The morning was warm, the sun was bright; they were moving gently with the tide, careless, happy. As he stood there gazing seawards and astern—for the ship had swung to the outgoing tide—Halcott could not help envying them.
“Ah!” he said half aloud, “you are at home, sweet birds; never a care to look forward to, contentment in your breasts, beauty all around you.”
Then his thoughts went somehow wandering homewards to his beautiful house, his house with a tower to it, and his lovely gardens. They would not be neglected though. It was autumn here. It would be spring time in England, with its buds, its tender green leaves, its early flowers, and its music of birds. Then he thought of his dog. Fain would he have brought him to sea. The honest collie had placed his muzzle in his master’s hand on that last sad evening of parting, and glanced with loving, pleading eyes up into his face.
“Take me,” he seemed to say, “and take her.”
Her was Doris. His—Halcott’s—own Doris; the lovely girl for whom he had risked so much, for whom he would lay down his life; the girl that would be his own fair bride, he told himself, if ever he returned. Ah! those weary “ifs!”
But he had looked into the dog’s bonnie brown eyes.
“Friend,” he had said, “you will stay with Doris. You will never leave her side till I come back. You will watch her for me.”
And he remembered now how Doris had at that moment thrown herself into his arms, and strained him to her breast in a fit of convulsive weeping.
And this had been the parting.