Once on the ferry boat, she leaned her elbows on the railing and, as she listened to the talk of the water, she grew calmer. For it was strange, wise talk with a laugh under it. The little choppy waves seemed to be telling her that life was short and sweet. Grey and blue and dun colour, pink and rose red, the waves shouted and sang together. And above the roofs of the receding city, wrapped in the mists of evening and the ascending vapour of traffic, the dull and yet flaming disk of the sun hung suspended.
A passenger disturbed her and she shifted her position. Important little tugs towing huge rafts, and the arms of derricks being convoyed over the water, like helpless giants, came into view; and for a time the ferry boat passed into the sheltering shadow of a great bridge. Emerging from one confused and sparkling distance and disappearing into another, the bridge appeared like a tangible bow of promise between the two cities. The sight of the cable cars and the tiny moving mites that, like insects, slowly crawled over it, comforted her like a friendly omen.
But when they gained the other shore and she entered the station, the locomotives, emitting great volumes of smoke, recalled to her mind her grandfather's fanciful description; and she remembered with a pang how she used to behold the world in an innocent and beautiful fashion. But now she saw deeper, now she understood all.
The rest of the trip she ceased to think. She had entered that land known to every unhappy lover, that land in which the misery, longing and fierce passion that consume his heart, constitute the one reality in a universe otherwise cold and dead.
CHAPTER X
IN THE GARDEN
The sight of Annie, arrayed in a freshly-ironed white dress and sitting in the carriage behind Peter, gave Rachel a disagreeable shock.
"Mr. Hart thought very likely you'd come on the Express, and he sent me along for the drive," and Annie moved her starched flounces that Rachel might sit beside her. "Was it hot in the city?"
"Yes, very."
"And did you go to the marble works to see the new machine? Alexander said that he had asked you."