At last she pushed off, stepped in and punted herself across, and once out again on dry ground tried to hold herself to a walk. The sand, ribbed and hard beneath her feet, spoke to the fact that the tide had been gone for hours. It was extraordinary how forgotten the sands always seemed as soon as the tide had gone away. Only those who had proved it by daily experience could believe that the water would ever return. Even to them it remained something of the miracle that it was in truth, arousing continually a thrill of awed surprise. Yet, side by side with that impression of final retreat, of waste that had always been waste and would never be reclaimed, was one of a brooding terror that was only waiting its hour. The sea and the sands were like cat and mouse, May thought,--the one, aloof, indifferent, yet always poised to leap; the other, inert, paralysed though apparently free, and always the certain victim in the end. She looked behind and before from the quiet home which she had left to the still more lonely and quiet house which was her goal. There was a point about half-way across at which it seemed as if she would never reach the one, never get back to the other in all time. Both seemed to recede from her equally as she moved, vague shapes formed only of imagination and the mist. Just for a moment that vagueness of things which she knew to be concrete caught her by the throat. The little that she could see of the earth was so cloudlike, so lacking in sturdy strength. The very shore of the marsh looked as though a breath might dissolve it in thin air. Though the distance across was little more than a mile, the feeling of space around her was infinite as the sky. The sands seemed suddenly to become a treadmill under her feet, turning and turning, but never bringing her to the horizon which she sought. The whole doorway of the bay was blocked by the great wall of mist, and over the Lake mountains there was a smother of mist, and mist over all the land that went east to the Pennine range. She began to fear even the crinkled sand which felt so firm, as if it might suddenly sway and shift like one of the many traps with which the bay was sown. Behind her, the grey, faint-gleaming strip of the channel seemed to cut her off from her safe home. A slice of the bank broke suddenly with an echoing spash, chilling her with the lonely terror of water that has a victim in its hold. The boat, helpless-looking, inert, a mere black speck on the channel edge, seemed the only insoluble thing beside herself. She longed for the comfort of her feet on the tarred boards, for the reassurance of her hands against the sculls. It was a moment or two before she had the courage to let it go, and face a world that was full of bodiless shapes and evanescent shores.