However, Bessie would be there for three days to help him, and with this thought he felt comforted.
* * * * *
"It's been a great three days," sighed John, on the following Tuesday. Bessie also sighed.
They had clambered down from the parapet below the Cliff House and sat watching the seals at play upon the rocks a stone's throw out from beneath their feet. Their position marked the southern portal of the famous Golden Gate, through which a mile-wide stream of liquid blue was running. Across the Gate rose the sheer gray cliffs of Marin County and beyond those the rugged greens and blues of the mountains, spiked in the center by the peak of Tamalpais.
Before their faces, the ocean, in swells and scoops of ever grayer gray, ran out to catch the horizon as it fell, illumined in its lower reaches by the sun, which was sinking into the haze above the waters like a lustrous orange ball.
Southward, beyond the green head of Golden Gate Park, the yellow gray of the sand dunes and the blue gray of the sea met in a lingering, playful kiss that swept back and forth in a long shimmering line which ran on sinuously, growing fainter and fainter, till lost in the shadow of the distant cliffs.
The hour was five o'clock. At eight that night John was to leave for Los Angeles. His vacation—the only vacation of his hard-driven life—was to end, and an epoch in his existence was also nearing its end. The past was clear as the land behind him; the future was an area of tossing uncertainty. Nothing appeared,—no track, no wake, no sail, no sun even. Only far over, beyond the curve of the horizon, was a kind of strange, unearthly glow, and on this his eye was set.
For three days his soul had ebbed and flowed like that lip of foam upon the beach, now stealing far up on the land,—for him the backward track; now turning and running far out to sea,—for him the way of adventure and advance.
But now the ultimate decision was to be made. Bessie saw it rising like a tide upon that face which once had seemed not to fit, a rapt look which snuggled in the hills and hollows and then began to harden like setting concrete. No one would call that face homely now. Interesting, most likely, would have been the word.
The gray eyes burned brighter, the lips grew tighter. The chin advanced, moved out to sea a little, as it were.