“I don’t. She doesn’t like me. Where are we?”
“About south of the Exe.”
Knight said no more on the words of her dream. They watched the sky till Elfride grew calm, and the dawn appeared. It was mere wan lightness first. Then the wind blew in a changed spirit, and died away to a zephyr. The star dissolved into the day.
“That’s how I should like to die,” said Elfride, rising from her seat and leaning over the bulwark to watch the star’s last expiring gleam.
“As the lines say,” Knight replied——
“‘To set as sets the morning star, which goes
Not down behind the darken’d west, nor hides
Obscured among the tempests of the sky,
But melts away into the light of heaven.’”
“Oh, other people have thought the same thing, have they? That’s always the case with my originalities—they are original to nobody but myself.”
“Not only the case with yours. When I was a young hand at reviewing I used to find that a frightful pitfall—dilating upon subjects I met with, which were novelties to me, and finding afterwards they had been exhausted by the thinking world when I was in pinafores.”
“That is delightful. Whenever I find you have done a foolish thing I am glad, because it seems to bring you a little nearer to me, who have done many.” And Elfride thought again of her enemy asleep under the deck they trod.
All up the coast, prominences singled themselves out from recesses. Then a rosy sky spread over the eastern sea and behind the low line of land, flinging its livery in dashes upon the thin airy clouds in that direction. Every projection on the land seemed now so many fingers anxious to catch a little of the liquid light thrown so prodigally over the sky, and after a fantastic time of lustrous yellows in the east, the higher elevations along the shore were flooded with the same hues. The bluff and bare contours of Start Point caught the brightest, earliest glow of all, and so also did the sides of its white lighthouse, perched upon a shelf in its precipitous front like a mediaeval saint in a niche. Their lofty neighbour Bolt Head on the left remained as yet ungilded, and retained its gray.