and strode in unhesitatingly.
The tide was just on the turn, and the touch of the light-swelling
waves was at first cold and gentle. But soon he was breasting them
with steady stroke, moving out to some indefinite point where should
be the full mystery of the night and the spaces, and whence the shore
should be swallowed up in the darkness. His sense of the world passed
into a large vagueness; the blood pulsed through his veins
exquisitely; the kiss of the water was warm and sweet. Steadily,
steadily his hands cleft it, the activity of his brain dwindling and
dwindling and lapsing at length into a mere self-abandonment to the
sensuousness of the motion. He was scarcely conscious of controlling
his muscles; his arms seemed to work of themselves in rhythmical
sweep. Onward, onward! with only a fused feeling of warmth and
exhilaration and a drowsy sense of vague far-spreadingness.

The consciousness of time had passed away, and that of space was a
mere intensity of feeling. Once or twice he was dreamily aware of a
strange halo of light haunting his universe.

But at last the vibrating hoot of some great passing steamship drove
suddenly across the waters, a keen note that thrilled through him
startlingly, dispelling the delicious languor that possessed him. He
had a sense as of awakening from slumber, and then he knew that the
vague halo was a long beam, flying round at some distance from him,
that came from the light-house at the end of the great stone pier. His
mind leapt again to full activity, shaking off the medley of sensation
that had been flowing against his passive consciousness with such dull
uniformity.

His blood glowed with the full glory of the sea; he was conscious of
a clear sanity, for the brooding mists had vanished from his spirit.
And even as he heard and felt the throb of mighty engines that came to
him from afar, and considered what mastery over the deeps they
represented, the thought occurred to him that he, too, was master of
the boundless water, buoyant at his will. An exaltation sprang up in
him as he realised throughout all his fibre its sensuous vastness, its
elastic massiveness.

And with this exultant sense of mastery, with this feeling of the good
red blood coursing through him, there seemed to have awakened in him
an invincible something that held him to existence with a grip that
could know no loosening, that made his whole being cohere with a
strength that not all the forces of dissol