I suppose it was one of those anonymous
things against your father,--the old man's dead set against 'em now."
But John Milton heard him vaguely, and presently excused himself for a
row on the moonlit bay.
The active exertion, with intervals of placid drifting along the
land-locked shore, somewhat soothed him. The heaving Pacific beyond
was partly hidden in a low creeping fog, but the curving bay was softly
radiant. The rocks whereon she sat that morning, the hotel where she
was now quietly reading, were outlined in black and silver. In this
dangerous contiguity it seemed to him that her presence returned,--not
the woman who had met him so coldly; who had penned those lines; the
woman from whom he was now parting forever, but the blameless ideal he
had worshiped from the first, and which he now felt could never pass out
of his life again! He recalled their long talks, their rarer rides and
walks in the city; her quick appreciation and ready sympathy; her pretty
curiosity and half-maternal consideration of his foolish youthful past;
even the playful way that she sometimes seemed to make herself younger
as if to better understand him. Lingering at times in the shadow of the
headland, he fancied he saw the delicate nervous outlines of her face
near his own again; the faint shading of her brown lashes, the soft
intelligence of her gray eyes. Drifting idly in the placid moonlight,
pulling feverishly across the swell of the channel, or lying on his oars
in the shallows of the rocks, but always following the curves of the
bay, like a bird circling around a lighthouse, it was far in the night
before he at last dragged his boat upon the sand.
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