"Eve! Eve! You've brought me through death's shadow! You gave me
back my mind!"
She let her hand rest between his. At first he could not make out
what her slightly moving lips uttered, and bending nearer he heard
her murmur: "Beside the still waters." The sea had become as calm as
a pond.
And now the transport was losing headway, scarcely moving at all.
Forward and aft the gun-crews, no longer alert, lounged lazily in
the sunshine watching a boat being loaded and swung outward from the
davits.
"Is somebody going ashore?" asked McKay.
"We are," said the girl.
"Just you and I, Eve?"
"Just you and I."
Then he saw their luggage piled in the lifeboat.'
"This is wonderful," he said. "I have a house a few miles inland
from Strathlone Head."
"Will you take me there, Kay?"
Such a sense of delight possessed him that he could not speak.
"That's where we must go to make our plans," she said. "I didn't
tell you in those dark hours we have lived together, because our
minds were so far apart--and I was fighting so hard to hold you."
"Have you forgiven me--you wonderful girl?"
His voice shook so that he could scarcely control it. Miss Erith
laughed.
"You adorable boy!" she said. "Stand still while I unlace your
life-belt. You can't travel in this."
He felt her soft fingers at his throat and turned his face upward.
All the blue air seemed glittering with the sun-tipped wings of
gulls. The skylark's song, piercingly sweet, seemed to penetrate his
soul. And, as his life-suit fell about him, so seemed to fall the
heavy weight of dread like a shroud, dropping at his feet. And he
stepped clear--took his first free step toward her--as though
between them there were no questions, no barriers, nothing but this
living, magic light--which bathed them both.
There seemed to be no need of speech, either, only the sense of
heavenly contact as though the girl were melting into him,
dissolving in his arms.
"Kay!"
Her voice sounded as from an infinite distance. There came a
smothered thudding like the soft sound of guns at sea; and then her
voice again, and a greyness as if a swift cloud had passed across
the sun.
"Kay!"
A sharp, cold wind began to blow through the strange and sudden
darkness. He heard her voice calling his name--felt his numbed body
shaken, lifted his head from his arms and sat upright on his bunk in
the dim chill of his cabin.
Miss Erith stood beside his bed, wearing her life-suit.
"Kay! Are you awake?'
"Yes."
"Then put on your life-suit. Our destroyers are firing at something.
Quick, please, I'll help you!"
Dazed, shaken, still mazed by the magic of his dream, not yet clear
of its beauty and its passion, he stumbled to his feet in the
obscurity. And he felt her chilled hand aiding him.
"Eve--I--thought--"
"What?"
"I thought your name--was Eve--" he stammered. "I've
been--dreaming."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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