Nor did Portlossie alone send out her boats, like huge seabirds
warring on the live treasures of the deep; from beyond the headlands
east and west, out they glided on slow red wing,--from Scaurnose,
from Sandend, from Clamrock, from the villages all along the coast,
--spreading as they came, each to its work apart through all the
laborious night, to rejoin its fellows only as home drew them back
in the clear gray morning, laden and slow with the harvest of the
stars. But the night lay between, into which they were sailing
over waters of heaving green that for ever kept tossing up roses
--a night whose curtain was a horizon built up of steady blue, but
gorgeous with passing purple and crimson, and flashing with molten
gold.
Malcolm was not one of those to whom the sea is but a pond for fish,
and the sky a storehouse of wind and rain, sunshine and snow: he
stood for a moment gazing, lost in pleasure. Then he turned to Lady
Florimel: she had thrown her daisies on the sand, appeared to be
deep in her book, and certainly caught nothing of the splendour
before her beyond the red light on her page.
"Saw ye ever a bonnier sicht, my leddy?" said Malcolm.
She looked up, and saw, and gazed in silence. Her nature was full
of poetic possibilities; and now a formless thought foreshadowed
itself in a feeling she did not understand: why should such a
sight as this make her feel sad? The vital connection between joy
and effort had begun from afar to reveal itself with the question
she now uttered.
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