one's throw off the
direction of the boat. Before his wits had grasped the certainty
possessing them, fiery envy and desire to be alongside her set his
fingers fretting at buttons. A grand smooth swell of the waters lifted
her, and her head rose to see her world. She sank down the valley,
where another wave was mounding for its onward roll: a gentle scene of
Weyburn's favourite Sophoclean chorus. Now she was given to him--it
was she. How could it ever have been any other! He handed his watch to
little Collett, and gave him the ropes, pitched coat and waistcoat on
his knees, stood free of boots and socks, and singing out, truly enough,
the words of a popular cry, 'White ducks want washing,' went over and
in.

CHAPTER XXVII. A MARINE DUET

She soon had to know she was chased. She had seen the dive from the
boat, and received all illumination. With a chuckle of delighted
surprise, like a blackbird startled, she pushed seaward for joy of the
effort, thinking she could exult in imagination of an escape up to the
moment of capture, yielding then only to his greater will; and she meant
to try it.

The swim was a holiday; all was new--nothing came to her as the same
old thing since she took her plunge; she had a sea-mind--had left her
earth-mind ashore. The swim, and Matey Weyburn pursuing her passed up,
out of happiness, through the spheres of delirium, into the region
where our life is as we would have it be a home holding the quiet of the
heavens, if but midway thither, and a home of delicious animation of the
whole frame, equal to wings.

He drew on her, but he was distant, and she waved an arm. The shout of
her glee sprang from her: 'Matey!' He waved; she heard his voice. Was it
her name? He was not so drunken of the sea as she: he had not leapt out
of bondage into buoyant waters, into a youth without a blot, without an
aim, satisfied in tasting; the dream of the long felicity.

A thought brushed by her: How if he were absent? It relaxed her stroke
of arms and legs. He had doubled the salt sea's rapture, and he had
shackled its gift of freedom. She turned to float, gathering her knees
for the funny sullen kick, until she heard him near. At once her stroke
was renewed vigorously; she had the foot of her pursuer, and she called,
'Adieu, Matey Weyburn!'

Her bravado deserved a swifter humiliation than he was able to bring
down on her: she swam bravely, and she was divine to see ahead as well
as overtake.

Dart