The fortnight\'s cruise was at an end, the Torch had gone back to her owners, without Durant, who had contrived to stay on board the Windward till the latest possible moment. The yacht was lying-to, outside the same white-walled harbor where she had first found Durant. She wheeled aimlessly about with slackened sails, swaying, balancing, hovering like a bird on the wing, impervious and restless, waiting for the return of the boat that was to take Durant on shore. It had only just put off with the first load of guests—the Manbys—under Georgie Chatterton\'s escort. As Durant watched it diminishing and vanishing, he thought of how Georgie had described their hostess\'s method of dealing with exacting friends. She was dropping them, very gently, at the nearest port. Poor Manby! And it would be his own turn next. And yet Georgie had said, "You never know." He must and would know; at any rate, he would take his chance. Meanwhile, he had a whole hour before him to find out in, for the crew had commissions in the town. That hour was Frida\'s and his own.

The two weeks had gone he knew not how; and yet he had taken count of the procession of the days. Days of clouds, when, under a drenching mist, the land [Pg 341] was sodden into the likeness of the sea, the sea stilled into a leaden image of the land; days of rain, when the wet decks shone like amber, and the sea\'s face was smoothed out and pitted by the showers; days of sun, when they went with every sail spread, over a warm, quivering sea, whose ripples bore the shivered reflections of the sky in so many blue flames that leaped and danced with the Windward in her course; days of wind, when the Channel was a race of tumultuous waves, green-hearted, silver-lipped, swelling and breaking and swelling, and flowering into foam, days when the yacht careened over with steep decks, laid between wind and water, flush with the foam, driven by the wind as by her soul; days when Durant and Frida, who delighted in rough weather, sat out together on deck alone. They knew every sound of that marvelous world, sounds of the calm, of water lapping against the yacht\'s side, the tender, half-audible caress of the sea; sounds of the coming gale, more seen than heard, more felt than seen, the deep, long-drawn shudder of the sea when the wind\'s path is as the rain\'s path; and that sound, the song of her soul, the keen, high, exultant song that the wind sings, playing on her shrouds as on a many-stringed instrument. The boat, in her unrest, rolling, tossing, wheeling and flying, was herself so alive, so one with the moving wind and water, and withal so slight a shell for the humanity within her, that she had brought them, the man and the woman, nearer and nearer to the heart of being; they touched through her the deep elemental forces of the world. The sea had joined what the land had kept asunder. At this last hour of Durant\'s last day they were drifting rather than sailing past a sunken shore, a fringe of gray slate, battered by the tide and broken into thin layers, with edges keen as knives; above it, low woods [Pg 342] of dwarf oaks stretched northward, gray and phantasmal as the shore, stunted and tortured into writhing, unearthly shapes by the violence of storms. For here and now the sea had its way; it had taken on reality; and earth was the phantom, the vanishing, the vague.

They had been pacing the deck together for some minutes, but at last they stood still, looking landward.

Durant sighed heavily and then he spoke.

"Frida, you know what I am going to say——"

They turned and faced each other. In the man\'s eyes there was a cloud, in the woman\'s a light, a light of wonder and of terror.

She smiled bravely through her fear. "Yes, I know what you are going to say. But I don\'t know——"

"What don\'t you know?"

"I don\'t know what you mean."

"You don\'t know what I mean?"

"I know you are going to say you love me, and you had better not. For I don\'t know what that means. The thing you call love was left out of my composition. Some women are born like that."

"I don\'t believe it. It\'s only your way of saying that you don\'t care for me."

"I like you. I always have liked you. I\'ll go farther—if I ever loved any man it would be you."

"The fact remains that it isn\'t?"

"It isn\'t, and it never will be. But you may be very certain that it will never be anyone else."

"Tell me one thing—was there ever a time when it might have been?"

"That isn\'t fair. I can\'t answer that question."

"You can. Think—was there ever a time, no matter how short, the fraction of a minute, when if I\'d only had the sense, if I had only known——" [Pg 343]

"Are you sure you didn\'t know? I was afraid you did."

"Then you really mean it—that if I\'d only asked you then——"

"Thank Heaven, you did not!"

"Why are you thanking Heaven?"

"Because—because—I can\'t be sure, but I might—I might have taken you at your word."

"And why not?"

"I would have made a great mistake. The same mistake that you are making now."

"Mistake?"

"You mistook the idea for the reality once, if you remember—and now aren\'t you mistaking the reality for the idea?"

"Frida, you are too subtle; you are the most exasperating woman in the world——"

"There, you see. That\'s the sort of thing we should always be saying to each other if I let you have your way. But supposing you did have it; if we were married we could not understand each other better than we do; so we should not be one bit better off. By this time we should have got beyond the phase we started with——"

"But we should have had it——"

"Yes; and found ourselves precisely where we are now."

"Where we were yesterday, you mean."

"Yes. We were good enough friends yesterday."

"And what are we to-day? Enemies?"

She smiled sadly. "It looks like it. At any rate, we seem to have some difficulty in understanding each other."

"Good God! how coolly you talk about it! Understanding! Do you never feel? Has it never even occurred [Pg 344] to you that I can feel? Have you any notion what it is to be made of flesh and blood and nerves, and to have to stay here, squeezed up in this confounded boat, where I can\'t get away from you?"

"You can get away in three-quarters of an hour, and meanwhile, if you like, you can go below."

"If I did go below I should still feel you walking over my head. I should hear you breathe. And now to look at you and touch you, and know all the time that something sticks between us——"

He stopped and looked before him. It was true that the sea had brought them together. Amid the d?monic triumph and jubilation of the power that claimed them for its own they, the man and the woman, had been thrown on each other, they had looked into each other\'s eyes, spirit to spirit, the divine thing struggling blind and uncertain in nature\'s tangled mesh. But now, so near, on the verge of the intangible, the divine, it came over Durant that after all it was this their common nature, their flesh and blood, that was the barrier; it merged them with the world on every side, but it hedged them in and hid them from each other.

"As you know, we\'re the best friends in the world; there\'s only one thing that sticks between us—the eternal difference in our points of view."

"I was perfectly right. Why couldn\'t I trust my first impressions? I thought you frigid and lucid and inhuman——"

"Inhuman?"

"Well, not a bit like a woman."

"My dear Maurice, you are very like a man."

"There\'s something about you——"

"Really? What is it, do you think?"

"Oh, nothing; a slight defect, that\'s all. It must be as you say, and as I always thought, that you are incapable [Pg 345] of feeling or understanding feeling. I repeat, there\'s something about you——"

"Ah, Maurice, if you want the truth, there\'s something about you. I always knew, I felt that it was in you, though I wouldn\'t own that it was there. Now I am sure. You\'ve been doing your best to make me sure."

"What have I made you sure of?"

"Sure that you are incapable, not of loving perhaps, but of loving a certain kind of woman the way she wants to be loved. You can\'t help it. As I said before, it is the difference in the point of view. We should get no nearer if we talked till doomsday."

"My point of view, as you call it, has entirely changed."

"No. It is I who have changed. Your point of view is, and always will be, the same."

He tried hard to understand.

"Does it come to this—that if I had loved you then you would have loved me now?"

"You couldn\'t have loved me then. You were not that sort."

He understood her meaning and it maddened him. "It wasn\'t my fault. How the devil was I to see?"

"Exactly, how were you? There are some things which you can\'t see. You can see everything you can paint, and, as you are a very clever artist, I dare say you can paint most things you can see."

"What has that got to do with it?"

"Everything. It\'s your way all through. You love me because what you see of me is changed. And yet all that time I was the same woman I am now. I am the same woman I was then."

"But I am not the same man!"

"The very same. You have not changed at all." [Pg 346]

She meant that he was deficient in that spiritual imagination which was her special power; she meant that she had perceived the implicit baseness of his earlier attitude as a man to her as a woman, a woman who had had no power to touch his senses. It was, as she had said, the difference in their points of view; hers had condemned him forever to the sensual and the seen.

He stood ashamed before her.

Yet, as if she had divined his shame and measured the anguish of it and repented her, she laid her hand on his arm.

"Maurice, it isn\'t entirely so. I have been horribly unjust."

"Not you! You are justice incarnate. If I had loved you then——"

"You couldn\'t have loved me then."

"So you have just told me."

"You had good cause. I was not and could not be then—whatever it is that you love now."

"But I might have seen——"

"Seen? Seen? That\'s it. There was nothing to see."

Her eyes, in her pity for him, filled with tears, tears that in his anger he could not understand.

"Why are you always reminding me of what I was five years ago? I have changed. Can\'t a man change if you give him five years to do it in?"

"Perhaps. It\'s a long time."

"Time? It\'s an eternity. If I was a brute to you, do you suppose the consciousness of my brutality isn\'t a far worse punishment than anything I could have made you feel?"

She raised her eyebrows. "What? Have you been suffering all this time—this eternity?" [Pg 347]

"Yes. That is, I\'m suffering enough now."

"Then perhaps you have some idea of what you made me feel."

"Again?"

"It\'s the first time I\'ve reproached you with it, even in my thoughts."

He looked at her with unbelieving eyes. And yet he knew that it was true. Her sweetness, her lucidity, had been proof against the supreme provocation. She had forgiven, if she had not forgotten, the insult that no woman remembers and forgives.

As his eyes wandered the hand that had lain so lightly on his arm gripped it to command his attention, and he trembled through all his being. But she no longer shrank from him; she kept her hold, she tightened it, insisting.
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