As Viney had said, the wind came through the fog, driving the boat in unseen fashion, while the sail hung almost limp. There was a little eddy of oily water at the stern; they were slipping, sliding through the fog-bank, back to the earth.
"Back to life," Falkner hummed, "back; back, to the land, to the world!"
The fog clung in Margaret's hair, and dimmed her eyes. She bared her arms to feel the cool touch of it on her skin. Clean things, like the sun yesterday, the resinous firs, the salty fog,—clean elemental things,—how she loved them!
"And suppose," Falkner suggested, "I should lose my way in this nest of reefs and islands and we got shipwrecked or carried out to sea?"
"I should hear Ned calling through the fog." A simple answer, but withal enough. Their hour, which they had set themselves, was past. And lying here in the impalpable mist, slipping towards the hidden port, she was filled with ineffable content….
"You are still radiant!" Falkner said wonderingly.
"It can't fade—never wholly! I cherish it." She drew her arms close about her. "Sacred things never utterly die!"
They had found it, they had lived it, they knew—what the unspiritual and carnal millions that clutter God's earth may never know—ecstasy, the secret behind the stars, beyond the verge of the sea, in the great lunar spaces of spirit.
* * * * *
On they glided through the thoroughfares, around island points, across reaches of the sea, sweeping onward now with an audible gurgle in their wake, the sails bellying forward; veering this way, falling off there, as the impassive man touched the tiller, obeying an instinct, seeing into the dark beyond. Now a bit of cliff loomed in the fog, again a shingled roof or a cluster of firs, and the whistling buoy at the harbor's mouth began to bellow sadly,—reminders all of the shell of that world towards which they sailed. And at last the harbor, with its echoing bells and fog-whistles, the protesting shrieks of its man-machines; suddenly the colossal hull of a schooner at anchor. Then the ghostly outlines of the huddled shipping, the city roofs, the steeples, the shriek of engines in the freight yards—they touched the earth! It had ended. The noise of living reverberated in their ears.