Malcolm lifted his questioning to her searching eyes. “Don’t you see,” she went on, very softly, and lowering her look, from the half-conscious shame of half-unconscious falseness, “I can’t be all my life here at Lossie? We shall have to say good-bye to each other--never to meet again most likely. But if you should turn out to be of good family, you know,--” Florimel saw neither the paling of his brown cheek nor the great surge of red that followed, but, glancing up to spy the effect of her argument, did see the lightning that broke from the darkened hazel of his eyes, and again cast down her own. “--then there might be some chance,” she went on, “of our meeting somewhere--in London, or perhaps in Edinburgh, and I could ask you to my house--after I was married you know.” Heaven and earth seemed to close with a snap around his brain. The next moment, they had receded an immeasurable distance, and in limitless wastes of exhausted being he stood alone. What time had passed when he came to himself he had not an idea; it might have been hours for anything his consciousness was able to tell him. But, although he recalled nothing of what she had been urging, he grew aware that Lady Florimel’s voice, which was now in his ears, had been sounding in them all the time. He was standing before her like a marble statue with a dumb thrill in its helpless heart of stone. He must end this! Parting was bad enough, but an endless parting was unendurable! To know that measureless impassable leagues lay between them, and yet to be for ever in the shroud of a cold leave-taking!--To look in her eyes, and know that she was not there! A parting that never broke the bodily presence--that was the form of agony which the infinite moment assumed. As to the possibility she would bribe him with--it was not even the promise of a glimpse of Abraham’s bosom from the heart of hell. With such an effort as breaks the bonds of a nightmare dream, he turned from her, and, heedless of her recall, went slowly, steadily, out of the house. While she was talking, his eyes had been resting with glassy gaze upon the far off waters: the moment he stepped into the open air, and felt the wind on his face, he knew that their turmoil was the travailing of sympathy, and that the ocean had been drawing him all the time. He walked straight to his little boat, lying dead on the sands of the harbour, launched it alive on the smooth water within the piers, rove his halliard, stepped his mast, hoisted a few inches of sail, pulled beyond the sheltering sea-walls, and was tossing amidst the torn waters whose jagged edges were twisted in the loose-flying threads of the northern gale. A moment more, and he was sitting on the windward gunwale of his spoon of a boat, with the tiller in one hand and the sheet in the other, as she danced like a cork over the broken tops of the waves. For help in his sore need, instinct had led him to danger.