He was standing before her
like a marble statue with a dumb thrill in its helpless heart of
stone. He must end this! Parting was bad enough, but an endless
parting was unendurable! To know that measureless impassable leagues
lay between them, and yet to be for ever in the shroud of a cold
leave taking! To look in her eyes, and know that she was not there!
A parting that never broke the bodily presence--that was the form
of agony which the infinite moment assumed. As to the possibility
she would bribe him with--it was not even the promise of a glimpse
of Abraham's bosom from the heart of hell. With such an effort as
breaks the bonds of a nightmare dream, he turned from her, and,
heedless of her recall, went slowly, steadily, out of the house.
While she was talking, his eyes had been resting with glassy gaze
upon the far off waters: the moment he stepped into the open air,
and felt the wind on his face, he knew that their turmoil was the
travailing of sympathy, and that the ocean had been drawing him all
the time. He walked straight to his little boat, lying dead on the
sands of the harbour, launched it alive on the smooth water within
the piers, rove his halliard, stepped his mast, hoisted a few inches
of sail, pulled beyond the sheltering sea walls, and was tossing
amidst the torn waters whose jagged edges were twisted in the
loose flying threads of the northern gale. A moment more, and he
was sitting on the windward gunwale of his spoon of a boat, with
the tiller in one hand and the sheet in the other, as she danced
like a cork over the broken tops of the waves.
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