Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Married people -- Fiction
The relief of tears didn't come to her until she saw, just ahead, the
island where, for two paradisiacal weeks, she and Rodney had made their
camp. Here she beached her canoe and went ashore; crept into a little
natural shelter under a jutting rock, where they had lain one day while,
for three hours, a violent unheralded storm had whipped the lake to
lather. The heap of hemlock branches he had cut for a couch for them was
still there.
At the end of half an hour, she observed with a sort of apathetic
satisfaction, that the weather conditions of their former visit were
going to be repeated now--a sudden darkness, a shriek of wind, a wild
squall flashing across the surface of the little lake, and a driving
rain so thick that small as the lake was, it veiled the shore of it.
She watched it for an hour before it occurred to her to wonder what
Rodney would be doing--whether he'd have discovered her absence from the
house and begun to worry about her. She told herself that he
wouldn't--that he'd sit there until he finished his book, or until they
called him for lunch, without, as he himself had boasted that morning, a
thought of her entering his mind.
She wept again over this notion, luxuriating rather, it must be
confessed, in the pathos of it, until she caught herself in the act and,
disgustedly, dried her eyes. Of course he'd worry about her. Only there
was nothing either of them could do about it until the storm should be
over; then she'd paddle back to the house as fast as she could and set
his mind at rest.
Suddenly she sat erect, looked, rubbed her eyes, looked again, then
sprang to her feet and went out into the driving rain. A spot of white,
a larger one of black, two moving pin-points of light, was what she saw.
The white was Rodney's shirt, the black the canoe, the pin-points the
reflection from the two-bladed paddle as, recklessly, he forced his way
with it into the teeth of the storm. He wanted her, after all.
So, with a racing heart and flushed cheeks, she watched him. It was not
until he had come much nearer that she went white with the realization
of his danger--not until she could see how desperately it needed all his
strength and skill to keep his little cockle-shell from broaching to
and being swamped.
[Illustration: "Oh, my dear! I didn't know!"]
She went as far to meet him as she could--out to the end of the point,
and then actually into the water to help him with the half-filled boat.
They emptied it and hauled it up on the beach. Then, looking up at him a
little tremulously, between a smile and tears, she saw how white he was,
caught him in her arms and felt how he was trembling.
"I thought you were gone," he said, but couldn't manage any more than
that because of a great shuddering sob that stopped him.
"Don't!" she cried. "Don't.--Oh, my dear! I didn't know!"
Presently, back in the shelter again, she drew his head down on her
breast and held him tight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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