“Yes, thank Heaven!” said Morris. “Sit still, and I will make the boat secure. She has served us a good turn, and I do not want to lose her after all.”
She nodded, and wading into the water, with numbed hands he managed to lift the little anchor and carry it ashore in his arms.
“There,” he said, “the tide is ebbing, and she’ll hold fast enough until I can send to fetch her; or, if not, it can’t be helped. Come on, Miss Fregelius, before you grow too stiff to walk;” and, bending down, he helped her to her feet.
Their road ran past the nave of the church, which was ruined and unroofed. At some time during the last two generations, however, although the parishioners saw that it was useless to go to the cost of repairing the nave, they had bricked in the chancel, and to within the last twenty years continued to use it as a place of worship. Indeed, the old oak door taken from the porch still swung on rusty hinges in the partition wall of red brick. Stella looked up and saw it.
“I want to look in there,” she said.
“Wouldn’t it do another time?” The moment did not strike Morris as appropriate for the examination of ruined churches.
“No; if you don’t mind I should like to look now, while I remember, just for one instant.”
So he shrugged his shoulders, and they limped forward up the roofless nave and through the door. She stared at the plain stone altar, at the eastern window, of which part was filled with ancient coloured glass and part with cheap glazed panes; at the oak choir benches, mouldy and broken; at the few wall-slabs and decaying monuments, and at the roof still strong and massive.
“I dreamed of a place very like this,” she said, nodding her head. “I thought that I was standing in such a spot in a fearful gale, and that the sea got under the foundations and washed the dead out of their graves.”
“Really, Miss Fregelius,” he said, with some irritation, for the surroundings of the scene and his companion’s talk were uncanny, “do you think this an occasion to explore ruins and relate nightmares?” Then he added, “I beg your pardon, but I think that the cold and wet have affected your nerves; for my part, I have none left.”