Maid of the Mist

by John Oxenham

But Avice was soon herself again, and as the Spring quickened all about and in them, the bitterness of the experience gradually faded out of their recollection and only the brightness was left.

And then there was so much to interest one everywhere that the days were hardly long enough for all there was to see and do.

First, seals—mothers and babies galore. Those sandy beaches of the northern coast seemed a favourite basking place and nursery, and Avice could creep along behind the sandhills, and crawl up among the wire-grass, and peep over, and she never tired of watching them. There was something so human in the way the babies snuggled up to their mothers when they were hungry, and still more in the way the mothers looked down at their nurslings.

And the baby-rabbits. They were almost as entrancing as the seals, but far shyer and more difficult to spy upon.

For the simple lifting of a head among the sparse tufts of grass set the hollow below alive with tiny bobbing white scuts, whose terrified owners tumbled over one another in their anxiety to get below ground. Avice would not hear of rabbit-meat in those days. She said the very thought of it made her feel like a cannibal.

And lastly,—birds. They were coming back in flights. The eastern point seemed their chosen ground, but closer at hand stray families were found, and importunate babies were being fed by the cold-eyed mothers with whom, a few months later, they would be waging the fierce battle for food. But Avice never took to the birds as she did to the seals and rabbits. She could never forget what they would grow into—brigands and fighters and cold-blooded raucous screamers at all times.

Now and again they lived on the 'Jane and Mary' for a week by way of a change, and fish was always obtainable whether they were afloat or ashore.

The clear fire of their love waxed ever stronger, devoured the days and weeks and months, and refined and fused them all into golden memories without one smallest speck of alloy. More devoted lover never woman had, nor man a sweeter mistress. Never was princess of the blood—without a bar across her scutcheon—held in loftier esteem or shown it more gallantly. Never, in word or act, did he offend her sense of right in the smallest degree; yet she could set his heart leaping and his blood racing by a touch—and she knew it.

Sometime,—when he believed it right—she knew he would ask more of her. It was inevitable. She had known it from the beginning. And she had no fear of it. Love such as theirs knows nothing of fear.

They were not playing at love. They loved with all the white fire of passionate devotion which loses sight of self in the one beloved. For better, for worse; in life, in death, she was wholly his. With the ardour of the Spring in her blood, and the love-light in her eyes, she waited for him to speak.