So in the starlight they threaded the spruce forest down by the sea, and found the "camp," a wooden box, with a broad veranda hanging over the eastern cliff.
"Yes!" exclaimed Margaret, taking now her woman's place of command; "this is the very spot. We'll sleep here on the veranda. You can bring out the bedding. If we had ordered it all, we could not have discovered the perfect thing, like this!"
The gray pathway of the ocean lay at their feet, and from the headlands up and down the coast, from distant islands, the lights began to call and answer each other. A cloud of smoke far eastward hung over a seagoing steamer. And throughout the little island, over the floor of the ocean, in the wood about them, there was perfect stillness, a cessation of all movement.
"Peace! Such large and splendid peace!" Margaret murmured, as they stood gazing at the beauty of the coming night. Peace without and answering peace within. Surely they had come to the heart of solitude, removed from the tumultuous earth.
"Come!" he whispered at her ear, and she slowly turned her face to him.
"Now, I know!" she said triumphantly. "This has been sent to answer me,—all the glory and the wonder and the peace of life, my dearest! I know it all. We have lived all our years with this vision in our hearts, and it has been given to us to have it at last."
And as they lay down beside each other she murmured:—
"Peace that is above joy,—see the stars!"
And there beneath the tranquil stars in the calm night came the ecstasy of union, transcending Fate and Sorrow….
Thus at the extreme verge of human experience these two realized that inner state of harmony, that equilibrium of spirit, towards which conscious beings strive blindly, and which sanctioning what man forbids gives reason to life. The spirit within them declared that it was best so to gain the heights, whether in the final sum of life it should lie as Sin or Glory, For this night, for these immediate hours, as man and woman they would rise to wider kingdoms of themselves than ever otherwise might be reached.