In the sunshine of California, in the cheerfulness of life in San Francisco, Keturah grew steadily better. Dick Hand executed a variety of projects, and only Mermaid remained unstirred and uninfluenced by her surroundings, by the change of air and scene. It is perhaps wrong to speak of her as “unstirred.” She[217] was stirred and very deeply, but by no trifle of environment or of company. Down in her the great tides were swinging, moving resistlessly and in vast volume, imperceptible in their drift and direction on the surface. As was inevitable, Dick Hand again asked her to marry him and this time she gave him a final refusal. She did not put him off. She knew it would be useless. The current had set and was sweeping on through her. She could chart it, and she knew it would not shift. Something tremendous, something massive in her life would be required to deflect it.

“Why,” she asked herself, “should I pretend to myself any longer? I love Guy Vanton. I think I have always loved him. He is in peril and he needs my help. When he was caught in the surf did I wait to see if he could save himself? Not one instant! Why do I wait now? Why do I risk losing him, by letting him drown, forever? It isn’t right.”

She did up her hair in great coils, like thick cables of ship’s rope, and it seemed to her that each separate strand, so slender, so easily snapped, redoubled in its tensile power as it was gathered with the hundreds of others.

“Life,” she thought to herself, “is like that. We are tied to the past by a thousand filaments, every one of them slight, fragile, easily snapped, quickly broken. But they are all twisted together. They are like this coil of hair. They are like a thousand threads spun[218] together, not to be snapped, not to be broken. A thousand things join Guy to the past. Some of the threads join the two of us.”

A fresh thought struck her.

“He can never escape wholly from his past. And I am almost the only thing or person in it that is pleasant or even halfway wholesome for him to remember.”

She recalled what she had told him, that he must no longer be passive but must act. Did not this counsel apply to herself? She knew she wanted him. She knew he wanted her. But however great his want of her he could not and would not call upon her to make what might be the sacrifice of a life—her life—to save his own. How could he, a man nearing middle age, really nameless, a child of disgrace and the son and heir of evil, lonely, sensitive, not unliked, but virtually friendless—how could he ask her to become his wife? He could ask of her nothing that she did not freely and of her own impulse offer and give him—friendship, sympathy, help, advice. The last item had an ironical ring in Mermaid’s consciousness. Advice to the drowning!

If he had the strength to save himself he had that strength, and that was all there was to it. For what was she waiting? To see him exercise it? But she loved him. It was not proof of his strength she required. What he had, what he lacked, was nothing—simply nothing. If he hadn’t it, she had strength[219] enough for two. Suppose she failed? Suppose she knew she would fail? The old image persisted before her. If he were drowning and she knew that her effort to save him would not succeed, would she abandon him, just stand there watching, or await what would happen with averted eyes............