CHAPTER VII.
One day, while the year was still young, though the first thunder-heats of the early summer had come, he asked her to go with him to the sea ere the sun set.
"The sea?" she repeated. "What is that?"
"Is it possible that you do not know?" he asked, in utter wonder. "You who have lived all these years within two leagues of it!"
"I have heard often of it," she said, simply; "but I cannot tell what it is."
"The man has never yet lived who could tell—in fit language. Poseidon is the only one of all the old gods of Hellas who still lives and reigns. We will go to his kingdom. Sight is better than speech."
So he took her along the slow course of the inland water through the osiers and the willows, down to where the slow river ripples would meet the swift salt waves.
It was true what she had said, that she had never seen the sea. Her errands had always been to and fro between the mill and the quay in the town, no farther; she had exchanged so little communion with the people of the district that she knew nothing of whither the barges went that took away the corn and fruit, nor whence the big boats came that brought the coals and fish; when she had a little space of leisure to herself she had wandered indeed, but never so far as the shore; almost always in the woods and the meadows; never where the river, widening as it ran, spread out between level banks until, touching the sea, it became a broad estuary.
She had heard speak of the sea, indeed, as of some great highway on which men traveled incessantly to and fro; as of something unintelligible, remote, belonging to others, indifferent and alien to herself.