ay we gave no further
thought to the rightfulness or wisdom of spending the next few hours
together. We thought only of those hours. Things lent themselves to us.
We stood up and walked out in front of the hotel and there moored to a
stake at the edge of the water was a little leaky punt, the one vessel
on the Engstlen See. We would take food with us as we decided and row
out there to where the vast cliffs came sheer from the water, out of
earshot or interference and talk for all the time we had. And I remember
now how Mary stood and called to Miss Satchel's window to tell her of
this intention, and how I discovered again that exquisite slender grace
I knew so well.

You know the very rowing out from the shore had in it something sweet
and incredible. It was as if we were but dreaming together and might at
any moment awaken again, countless miles and a thousand things apart. I
rowed slowly with those clumsy Swiss oars that one must thrust forward,
breaking the smooth crystal of the lake, and she sat sideways looking
forward, saying very little and with much the same sense I think of
enchantment and unreality. And I saw now for the first time as I watched
her over my oars that her face was changed; she was graver and, I
thought, stronger than the Mary I had known.

Even now I can still doubt if that boat and lake were real. And yet I
remember even minute and irrelevant details of the day's impressions
with an extraordinary and exquisite vividness. Perhaps it is that very
luminous distinctness which distinguishes these events from the common
experiences of life and puts them so above the quality of things that
are ordinarily real.

We rowed slowly past a great headland and into the bay at the upper end
of the water. We had not realized at first that we could row beyond the
range of the hotel windows. The rock that comes out of the lake is a
clear dead white when it is dry, and very faintly tinted, but when it is
wetted it lights warmly with flashes and blotches of color, and is seen
to be full of the most exquisite and delicate veins. It splinters
vertically and goes up in cliffs, very high and sculptured, with a
quality almost of porcelain, that at a certain level suddenly become
more rude and massive and begin to overhang. Under the cliffs the water
is very deep and blue-green, and runs here and there into narrow clefts.
This place where we landed was a kind of beach left by the recession of
the ice, all the rocks im