"Yes, … so I must go back soon and get ready."
The decision about Panama had been in the balance when Falkner left New York, she knew. Another opportunity of work in the States had come meanwhile; the decision had not been easy to make. When Falkner had written his wife, Bessie had replied: "You must do what seems best to you, as you have always done in the past…. Of course I cannot take the children to Panama." And when Falkner had written of the other work nearer home, Bessie said: "I don't care to make another move and settle in a new place…. We seem to get on better like this. Go to Panama if you want to, and we will see when you get back." So he had debated the matter with himself all the way up the coast….
"When must you leave?"
"To-morrow," he answered slowly, and again they were silent.
It was as she wished, as she had urged. The new work would reopen the man's ambition, and that must be. Where a man's work was concerned, nothing—nothing surely of any woman—should intervene. That was her feeling. No woman's pining or longing to fetter the man: clear the decks for action!
"To-morrow!" she murmured. She was smiling bravely, a smile that belied the tenseness within. Falkner picked the long spines from a pine branch, and arranged them methodically one by one in a row. They were not all alike, differing in minute characteristics of size and length and color. Nature at her wholesale task of turning out these millions of needles varied the product infinitely. And so with human beings!
They two were at peace together, their inner hunger appeased, with a sustaining content in life neither had ever known before. When they were together in this intimate silence, their spirits were freed from all bondage, free to rise, to leap upwards out of the encircling abysm of things. And this state of perfect meeting—spiritual equilibrium—must end….
"To-morrow?" she repeated, raising her eyes and gazing far out to the sunlit sea. And her heart was saying, "Tomorrow, and to-morrow, and the days thereafter,—and all empty of this!"
"It is best so," he said. "It could not go on like this!"
"No! We are human, after all!" and smiling wanly she rose to return to the house. When they reached his boat, Falkner took her hand,—a hand with finely tapering fingers, broad in the palm and oval,—a woman's hand, firm to hold, gentle to caress. The fingers tightened about his slowly. He looked into the blue eyes; they were dry and shining. And in those shining eyes he read the same unspoken words of revolt that rose within his heart,—'Why thus too late! too late! Why has life declared itself in all its meaning—too late? Why were we caught by the mistakes of half knowledge, and then receive the revelation?' The futile questions of human hearts.