"Oh, ridiculous! we can't see nearly so far!" "We can see so much farther and wider, deeper, clearer. The day blinds us. Spoils our sense of proportion. At night we see more of what creation really is. Our sun becomes one little star among thousands of greater ones, and we are humbled into a reasonableness which is very hard not to lose in the bewilderments of daylight." Ramsey sank to the arm of a chair, but when he remained standing she stood again. "Wasn't you saying something like that the evening we left New Orleans?" she asked. "To my father, yes. I couldn't have said it in daylight then. I couldn't say it in daylight now to any one but you, Ramsey." Her heart leaped again. Her eyes looked straight into his; could not look away. He spoke on: "You're a kind of evening to me, yourself; evening star." Her bosom pounded. She glanced up behind to the pilots. Watson had the wheel. As she strenuously pushed back her curls she felt her temples burn. She could have cried aloud for Hugh to cease, yet was mad for him to go on. And so he did. "You are my evening star in this nightfall of affliction. I tell you so not in weakness but in strength and in defiance: in the strength I summon for the hour before me; in the defiance I fling to your brothers. I may never have another chance. If ours were the ordinary chances of ordinary life I should say nothing now. I should wait; wait and give love time; time to prove itself in me--in both of us. I _ask_ nothing. I am too new to you, life is too new--to you--for pledges." She flashed him a glance and then, looking up the river, said, with the ghost of a toss: "I'm older than you think." He ignored the revelation. "But I will say," he went on, "--for these three days and nights have been three years to me and I feel a three years' right to say--I love you; love you for life; am yours for life though we never meet again. For I believe that we belong to each other from the centre of our souls, by a fitness plain even to the eyes of your brothers." [Illustration: "For I believe that we belong to each other from the centre of our souls, by a fitness plain even to the eyes of your brothers"] Still looking up the flood and red from brow to throat, Ramsey murmured two or three words which she saw he did not hear. Yet he stood without sound or look to ask what she had said, and presently repeated: "I believe in God's sight we belong to each other." "So do I," said Ramsey again, with clearer voice and with her brimming eyes looking straight into his. A footfall turned her and she faced the relieved pilot. "Isn't this Island Thirty-three," she asked, "right here on our starboard bow?"