Maid of the Mist

by John Oxenham

Then came the discharging, and the transporting of their heavy weights to the smaller raft on the lake, which could not take more than half their cargo at a time. So he took her and a portion across to the 'Martha,' and she undertook to have supper ready by the time he got back with the rest.

And surely she wrought pleasanter thoughts even than usual into her cooking that day, for it seemed to him, when in due course he sat opposite to her on the other side of their fire, that he had never enjoyed a meal so much in his life, deficient as it was in many things that he had always regarded as needful.

"We have done a good day's work," he said, as he lit his pipe at her request.

"I wonder what he will say about it."

"We will not let it trouble us. He has only himself to blame."

"I wonder if you and he would have quarrelled if I had never come."

"We certainly would if he had taken the line he has done. As long as he did his fair share of the providing I did not mind. But the position he took up was an impossible one."

They fell into reminiscent talk of that great outer world which seemed so remote, and from which, for all they knew, they were now for ever cut off. She had many strange recollections of her earlier life in France, some very terrible ones of the times of the Red Deluge, very mixed ones of the later times in England.

It was amazing to him to sit in that bare cabin of a deserted ship, on an island shunned by all, listening to her familiar talk of men and women who had been but names to him, until her intimate knowledge of them made them into actual living personages.

Her outlook on life had been very much wider than his own. She had lived among the scenes and people of whom he had only read in the news-sheets. He was immensely interested, both in the things she talked about and the way she talked about them. His questionings towards a clearer understanding on points which were to her matters of simplest elementary knowledge amused her not a little. And he got many a self-revealing glimpse into that strange past life of hers, from which she was so contented to escape, but which was yet so full of colour and contrast and vivid actuality that, in spite of all its discrepancies and disillusionments, it had assumed for her a certain glamour which she averred it had never worn at the time.