The two weeks had gone he knew not how; and yet he had taken count of the procession of the days. Days of clouds, when, under a drenching mist, the land was sodden into the likeness of the sea, the sea stilled into a leaden image of the land; days of rain, when the wet decks shone like amber, and the sea's face was smoothed out and pitted by the showers; days of sun, when they went with every sail spread, over a warm, quivering sea, whose ripples bore the shivered reflections of the sky in so many blue flames that leaped and danced with the _Windward_ in her course; days of wind, when the Channel was a race of tumultuous waves, green-hearted, silver-lipped, swelling and breaking and swelling, and flowering into foam, days when the yacht careened over with steep decks, laid between wind and water, flush with the foam, driven by the wind as by her soul; days when Durant and Frida, who delighted in rough weather, sat out together on deck alone. They knew every sound of that marvelous world, sounds of the calm, of water lapping against the yacht's side, the tender, half-audible caress of the sea; sounds of the coming gale, more seen than heard, more felt than seen, the deep, long-drawn shudder of the sea when the wind's path is as the rain's path; and that sound, the song of her soul, the keen, high, exultant song that the wind sings, playing on her shrouds as on a many-stringed instrument. The boat, in her unrest, rolling, tossing, wheeling and flying, was herself so alive, so one with the moving wind and water, and withal so slight a shell for the humanity within her, that she had brought them, the man and the woman, nearer and nearer to the heart of being; they touched through her the deep elemental forces of the world. The sea had joined what the land had kept asunder. At this last hour of Durant's last day they were drifting rather than sailing past a sunken shore, a fringe of gray slate, battered by the tide and broken into thin layers, with edges keen as knives; above it, low woods of dwarf oaks stretched northward, gray and phantasmal as the shore, stunted and tortured into writhing, unearthly shapes by the violence of storms. For here and now the sea had its way; it had taken on reality; and earth was the phantom, the vanishing, the vague. They had been pacing the deck together for some minutes, but at last they stood still, looking landward. Durant sighed heavily and then he spoke. "Frida, you know what I am going to say----" They turned and faced each other. In the man's eyes there was a cloud, in the woman's a light, a light of wonder and of terror. She smiled bravely through her fear. "Yes, I know what you are going to say. But I don't know----" "What _don't_ you know?" "I don't know what you mean." "You don't know what I mean?" "I know you are going to say you love me, and you had better not. For I don't know what that means. The thing you call love was left out of my composition. Some women are born like that."