Thus far to them had come revelation.
* * * * *
In the morning Margaret would play housewife. Sending Falkner to the Vineys' for the things needed, she cooked the meal while he swam out to the Swallow and made ready for the day's sail. Whimsically she insisted on doing all without his help, and when he was ready, she served him before she would eat herself,—"Just as Mrs. Viney would her man."
Did she wish to show him that she was equal to the common surface of living,—a comrade to do her part? Or, rather, was the act symbolical,—woman serving joyfully where she yields real mastery? The woman, so often capricious and disdainful, was submissive, as if she would say: "This man is my mate. I am forever his. It is my best joy to be through him myself."
And after the meal she insisted on completing the task by washing the dishes, putting all to rights in the camp; then mended a rent in his coat which he had got from a stumble in the dark the night before. He laughed, but her eyes shone.
"Let me do as long as I can! … There—wouldn't you and I shed things! That's the way to live,—to shed things." As they passed the Vineys' house on their way to the boat, Margaret observed:—
"That would do very well for us, don't you think? You could go lobstering, and I would have a garden. Can you milk a cow?" She was picturing the mould for their lives.
And all that day as they sailed among the islands, up thoroughfares, across the reaches of the sea, they played a little game of selecting the right cottage from the little white farm-houses dotted along the shores, and said, "We'd take this or that, and we'd do thus and so with it—and live this way!" Then they would laugh, and grow pensive, as if the land with its smoke wreaths had suddenly drifted past their eyes, reminding them of the future. 'You are bound with invisible cords,' a voice said. 'You have escaped in fancy, but to-morrow you will find the world wagging its old way.' But the woman knew that no matter what came, the morrow and all the morrows could never be again as her days once had been. For the subtle virtue of a great fulfilment is its power to alter the inner aspect of all things thereafter. Nothing could ever be the same to either of them. The stuff of their inner lives had been changed….
They sailed the day long in the full sun, which beat down with a memory of summer that already had departed. At noon they landed on a rocky islet, a mere clump of firs water bound, and after eating their luncheon they lay under the fragrant trees and talked long hours.
"If this hadn't been," Falkner said with deep gratitude, "we should not have known each other."