“No, my little one, I have not forgotten it,” said I, kissing her, thinking she was going to cry at what she thought was forgetfulness on my part. “Here it is next my heart, like yourself,” said I laughingly. “But, Elsie, alma mia, I was thinking of another anniversary, and a Friday evening too, to make it all the more wonderful! Don’t you recollect now?”
“Oh Dick, my dear husband,” she whispered, seizing my arm and gazing out over the taffrail at the ship, all ablaze now from the reflection of the sky, and nearly hull down to leeward. “I see, I see. What a strange coincidence. It is really wonderful!”
“It is, my darling,” said I. “But it was more extraordinary still that you should have seen me that memorable evening, now more than seven years ago, and when I too saw the Saint Pierre with you on her deck, and more wonderful still, when the captain and some of the crew even to this day insist we were actually several hundreds of miles apart!”
“Ah, but you are near me now, though, thank God!” she cried, looking up into my face with the most charming expression of delight, causing me to be foolish in bestowing another little kiss on her upturned face. “I don’t know how it was, but whether the ships were as far apart as the captain and the others say, or whether they were not, I did see your ship and you on her, as I told my dear, dear father at the time, and he himself did not believe it. Dick, dear, it must have been the gift of ‘second sight,’ as the Scotch people call it. There was a nun at the convent who had it, and could tell, so she said, when anything was about to happen to any of her family, though she couldn’t predict events concerning persons who were not ‘blood relations,’ as she termed them. Don’t be frightened Dick, but I do think that I must really possess the same faculty!”
“Well, if that is the case, sweetheart,” said I, “there must be some psychological affinity between us, and we are both endowed with the same weird gift, although the possession of the same has never been brought to the knowledge of us except on that one memorable occasion. That cannot be otherwise explained; but the fact of the two ships meeting afterwards may very readily be accounted for under the circumstances. The winds and currents of the ocean drifted them together, like as they did us, dear. Don’t you think so?”
She did not answer for a moment, and, as our steamer speeded on her way, the glow in the sky gradually faded and darkness crept over the face of the sea, the flashing light of Ushant whirling its luminous arms round in rapid rotation, like some spectral windmill, away in the distance over our lee, where the French ship had long since disappeared.
Presently my Elsie, who had been looking down into the now gloomy depths alongside, musing over the bitter-sweet memories of the past, lifted her eyes to mine, glancing heavenwards.
“No, Dick, my dearest,” said she, speaking at last, a certain hesitation and catch in her throat and a tear in the broken intonation of her voice, “Dick, I’ve been thinking and—and—it was a power greater than that of the winds and seas that brought us together. It was God!”