“Yes, it is home, love, our home for a little while--the home that can carry us to the other end of the world, if you will.” The quay, and the water, and the few faint lights here and there grew dark, and she knew no more, till she heard the sailors crying, “Yeo, heave, yeo,” and the heavy sails flapping, and the creak of the boom as it swayed in the wind, and felt the dancing motion of the boat as she cut her way through the waves, felt the strong arm that clasped her, and heard the low, fond voice that murmured in her ear, “Isola, Isola, forgive me! I could not live without you.” * * * * * That which came afterwards had seemed one long and lurid dream--a dream of fair weather and foul; of peril and despair; of passionate, all-conquering love. To-day, as she lay supine in the afternoon silence--lying as Tabitha had left her, in a fevered sleep--the vision of that past came back upon her in all its vivid colouring, almost as distinctly as it had re-acted itself in her hours of delirium, when she had lived that tragic chapter of her life over again, and had felt the fury of the waves and breathed the chill, salt air of the tempest-driven sea, and had seen the moon riding high amidst the cloud-chaos--now appearing, now vanishing, as if she too were a storm-driven bark in a raging sea. Oh God! how vividly those hours came back! The awful progress from Ushant to Arcachon; the darkness of the brief day; the horror of the long night; the shuddering yacht, with straining spars, and broadside beaten by a heaving mass of water, that struck her with the force of a thousand battering-rams, blow after blow, each blow seeming as if the next must always be the last--the final crash and end of all things. The pretty, dainty vessel, long and narrow, rode like an eggshell on those furious waters--here a long wall of inky blackness, rising like a mountain-ridge, and bearing down on the doomed ship, and beyond, as far as the eye could reach, a waste of surf, livid in the moonlight. What helpless insignificance, as of a leaf tossed on a whirlpool, when that mountainous mass took the yacht and lifted her on cyclopean shoulders, and shook her off again into the black trough of the sea, as into the depths of hell! And this not once only, nor a hundred times only, but on through that endless-seeming night, on in the sickly winter dawn and in the faint yellow gleam of a rainy noontide--on through day that seemed mixed and entangled with night, as if the beginning of creation had come round again, and the light were not yet divided from the darkness.