Late the next evening, standing with Louis and Captain Gillies on the bridge, Hildegarde saw ships on the western horizon. The fleet at last! anchored two miles off from Nome. It was bedtime, but quite impossible to sleep, though there would be no landing till next day. They said “Good-night” to the captain, and found their way to a corner of the deck, where alone together they might see the belated sun setting, and watch a pale-gold moon of enormous size riding portentously the clear-colored sky, too bright for stars. Hand in hand, hidden among the freight, they talked of the future, arranging it in the high fashion of the young, as though they two had been gods seated on Olympus. And as they talked the faint flush over yonder turned the purest rose, then deepened as each beautiful moment sped, till the sun, gone but now, hastened back like one who abandons a projected journey, and on the heels of his good-by comes shamefaced home. What would it be like, this day that he was bringing? What was waiting over yonder in that mysterious land, still in shadow, that skirts the hills of Nome? Just a little longer the weary passengers hung about the decks, while the blood-red sun peered at them over a violet sea, ready, when the shadow-curtain lifted, to clothe the naked truth of Nome with a final splendor. Whatever might come after, in this first actual vision of the place people had fared so far to find, it was to wear the hues of heaven. For the “boat-load of failure,” the dream they had called “Nome” was to die in a glory of gold and fire. The decks that had swarmed with excited people were falling silent. Men and women, whose whole lives hung upon what they should find waiting for them yonder, must be in bed betimes, that they might be ready to go ashore in the first boat. Soon only Hildegarde and Cheviot remained. But they were silent, watching all those white sails turn pink against the purple distance—sea and sky alike dyed deep, and still the honey-colored moon hanging there, immense, unreal. Whichever way they looked, this northern world was like something seen in a dream, spectral, uncanny, fitly ushered in by the sunrise in the night. To Hildegarde, as though given in that hour some gift of prophecy, it seemed that after all her journeying the land she looked on was still beyond the reach of sober day, fated to be for ever outside the experience of waking hours. Yet this incredible country for two years had been her father’s home! Louis would go ashore in the first boat and prepare Nathaniel Mar for his daughter’s coming. “If I were alone I should be imagining he might be dead.” Even as she said “if,” an inward dread clutched at her. “If you were alone I should be imagining things worse than death.” They drew together. As he held her, looking down into her eyes, a new gravity came into his own. “Are you sure _at last_?” he said.