As he finished this snatch from Cyrano de Bergerac's sky-traveling tale, Paul pretended to pick a comet's hair from his sleeve.
"Oh, my beloved 'Cyrano'!" exclaimed Emily, identifying the lines. "Do go on," and in answer Paul went through the entire scene between Cyrano and De Guiche.
"And I will applaud—I will pay you thus," and the gold woman reached up and kissed the helmsman on brow and lip.
Thus they both came back from across the world and the four centuries whither the magic of the romantic lines had transported them.
"Come, Emily, didn't you hear two bells strike? You have let me waste nearly an hour of your watch below. Turn in."
"It has been an hour of magic."
She held her mouth up to be kissed. His lips barely touched hers and flashed away, and as she went through the lounge door, he murmured, still in the words of his Gascon hero, "'I soon shall reach the moon.'"
Fifteen days later the gold woman was at the wheel again, having relieved Paul to permit him to make his noon observations. It was a Sunday. She watched him tremulously, and strangely troubled, where he worked at the chart table in the lounge.
The days that had passed had been those of which sea-singers make their happiest, bravest songs—by sunlight azure, cloudless sky, and wind-flecked, gem-shot, purple sea; by night an ermine-tipped deep, mirroring the star jewels and planet studdings of mystic, violet heavens. Through these halcyon days the Daphne had been winging her way ever eastward; flinging long sea leagues behind under the impulse of a driving, northwesterly wind. It had been as constant as a mother's love; with never a pause the bark had sped as she was speeding now, not as a hand-made fabric of steel and iron and wood and canvas and brass, but like a living, sensate thing into which her maker had breathed a soul. The crispness of Spring was in the air—air which whipped the blood like young wine.