Long afterward, he admired her instant foresight. She had already caught the oar-blade, just as it bobbed past in hissing lather. The tug steadily puffed farther into the distance, and—now that their need was over—began again the hoarse bellowing which Miles had heard in the bay. For some moments, exchanging a queer smile that conveyed more than utterance, each saw the other’s face touched, through the gleaming fog, with a light still more pale and northern.
“Bail her out,” said Miles, nodding at the half-filled punt, while he wrestled with broken thole-pins. When at last they were under way, it was in silence.
And yet danger had advanced each in the other’s knowledge, by that shared experience which was more than words, presence, or time—so savage, so close upon the happy side of life, had flashed the traitorous. Hidden together on the river, in a privacy of space, they had heard the pipes of Pan the gracious, and now Pan the terrible had “stamped his hoof in the night thicket.”
The waves of their enemy’s wake broke widely along the shore, with a pleasant sound as of the sea, but roving and transitory. The eddy at last eased the laboring oars. And by some mystery of the air, the fog began to blur and dissolve, to rise from a clearing circle of water, from the shaggy, wallowing rocks, the pink granite walls, the sombre undergrowth, till the fir-tops reared like a parapet in the thick of a siege, with ragged embrasures and sharp merlons bosomed in the smoke of cannonades.
“Almost home,” said Miles. And while he spoke, numberless floating bladders of seaweed brushed beneath, clogged the speed of their boat, and then let it pass into clear water at Alward’s. The weir, a string of cedar poles, like the tops of a sunken fence, ran a broken parallel to their shoreward course.
“Stop a minute,” begged the girl.
Very willingly he backed water, then rested his oars.
“Before we get within hearing.” She eyed him with grave decision. “I’ve been worried, and I want your—somebody’s advice.” Lowering her voice, she glanced at the weir: “Could a man make his living by that?”
Miles shook his head gloomily.
“Never in the world. I’m sorry, but—”