They had a little cottage on the bank of the lake, and Sanborn came up on Saturdays with the rest of the madly busy men who rest over Sunday and over-work the rest of the week. Mason had been with them a week, and, though he gave no sign, he was nearing a crisis in his life. He had gone to the point of finishing his letter to Rose—it was lying at that moment in his valise waiting to be posted—but it was a long way from being over with. It was a tremendous moment for him. As he approached the deciding moment the deed grew improbable, impossible. It was a very beautiful life there on the lake, with nothing to do but smoke and dream, but one evening he had the impulse to ask Isabel's advice, and after dinner he courteously invited her to sail with him.
There was some joking by Sanborn about the impropriety of such a thing on Isabel's part, and many offers to man the boat, which, Mason said, sprang from jealousy. "I consider I am doing you people a kindness in not letting you bore each other into black hatred." It ended in the two friends drifting away over the lake, while Sanborn called after them threats of war if they were not at the wharf at nine—sharp!
They talked commonplaces for a time, while the sky flushed and faded and the lake gradually cleared of its fisher boats. Slowly the colors grew tender and a subtle, impalpable mist rose from the water, through which the boat drifted before an imperceptible breeze.
The two sailors lay at ease, Mason at the rudder. The sail stood up light and airy and soundless as a butterfly's wing. It pointed at the sparse stars as if with warning finger.
The hour and the place were favorable to confidences. As the dusk deepened, a boat-load of young people put off into the lake, singing some wailing sweet song. They were far enough away to be unobtrusively impersonal. A plover was faintly calling from the sedgy shore on the other side.
"One should be forever young," said Mason broodingly.
Isabel said: "Once I heard a cow low, and a robin laugh, while a cricket chirped in the grass. Why should they have moved me so?"
Mason mused a moment. "The cow was maternity pleading for its suckling; the robin's laugh suggested a thousand springtimes, and the cricket prophesied the coming of frost and age. Love and loss are in the wail of yonder song, the loneliness of age in yonder piping bird, and the infinite and all-absorbing menstruum of death in the growing dusk."
"And the light of man's optimism in the piercing out of the stars."
"It may be so," he replied uncertainly.