She smiled back triumphantly. That was the truth she had divined the night he was to have left her.
"No," she assented, "we should have been almost strangers and been dissatisfied always."
"And now nothing can come between us, not time nor circumstance, nor pain.
Nothing! It is sealed for all time—our union."
"Our life together, which has been and will be forever."
None of the surface ways of life, no exchange of words, no companionship, could have created anything to resemble this inner union which had come about. The woman giving herself with full knowledge, the man possessing with full insight,—this experience had made a spirit common to both, in which both might live apart from each other, so long as they could see with the spirit,—an existence new, deep, inner.
So they talked of the life to be with perfect willingness, as two might who were to part soon for a long journey, which both would share intimately and real loneliness never seize them.
"And beyond this luminous moment," suggested the man,—his the speculative imagination,—"there must lie other levels of intimacy, of comradeship. If we could go on into the years like this, why, the world would ever be new,—we should go deeper into the mysteries every day, discovering ourselves, creating ourselves!"
The warm sunlight, the islands mirrored in the waveless sea, the aromatic breath of the spruce and fir, the salty scent of the tidal shore—this physical world in which they lay—and that other more remote physical world of men and cities—all, all was but the pictured drama of man's inner life. As he lived, each day dying and recreated, with an atmosphere of the soul as subtly shifting as the atmosphere of the earth, so this wonderful panorama of his faded, dissolved, was made anew. For out of the panorama of sense man builds his tabernacle, and calls it life, but within the veil there lies hidden beneath a power, that can unlock other worlds,—strange, beautiful worlds, like the mazes of the firmament through which the earth pursues its way. And the tide ebbing past this islet to the sea, flowing fast outward into the deep, carried them in its silent depths out into the new, the mysterious places of the spirit.
The sun sank, covering the islands and the sea with a rare amethystine glow deepening to a band of purple, like some old dyed cloth, then fading to pale green at the rim of the earth. There ensued a hush, a pause in life, that filled the air. 'We are fading, we are withdrawing,' whispered the elements. 'Our hour is past, the riotous hour, the springtime flood, the passionate will. And in our place the night will come and bring you peace.' The sadness of change, the sense of something passing, of moments slipping away to eternity! …
"Tell me," she said as they drifted back with the tide, "what is it?"