His life opened before him now, like a fair seaway. About his appointed tasks he would go in his appointed life ... sailing ships with needed cargoes ... a despatch messenger for the peoples of the world over the vast solitudes of sea ... doing his work well and willingly ... and asking no reward but that the bird of dusk, the mouth of honey, be his to love and be loved by ... to melt with and be one in occult alchemy of soul and mind and body ... to get strength and knowledge, and the understanding which is more than strength and knowledge.... He was twenty-eight, she was twenty-five. There were twenty years before them still, twenty years of love and understanding, and then a strange happy twilight, like the dusk of Antrim, that gives way hardly to the short night.... Some day she would marry him and come to his house ... some day when something that was wrong in her heart was righted and forgotten, something he had no wish to intrude upon, so closely did she conceal it.... There was a locked, haunted room in her heart ... poor heart!... but one day the presence would be exercised, and the room swept and garnished.... Some day she would marry him, and he would bring her home to Ulster.... And who better than she could understand the springy heather and the blue smoke-reek, the crickets of the evening and the curlew's call? And in the house where his mother was cold and arrogant, would be a warm and gracious lady ... Claire-Anne!... God! he was thinking long to be in Marseilles again, to go up the dusky path, to call, "Claire-Anne!" The big Belfast mate larruped down the short companionway. "How's she doing, Mr. McKinstry?" "She's doing fine, sir. If I may say so, there's not a better boat sails the water, not the _Sovereign of the Seas_ itself. Nor a better crew to handle things, not on board the king's yacht." "Nor a better mate, Mr. McKinstry." "Ah, well, sir; we do wir best." He tumbled on deck again, and Shane could hear him roar from amidships: "Lay forward, a couple of you damned farmers, and see if you can't get more out of those jibs. Faster! faster! You're as slow as the grace of God at a miser's funeral.... If I only had a crew...." Section 10 She stopped in her swift flight to him through the dusk of the Midi garden. "Dearest, why is your face so white? Your hands bruised?" "The consul said something to me--about you--and I knocked him down." "Oh!" she said, a shocked little cry, and: "Oh!" a drawn-out wail of pain. "Why did you strike him?" "Because he lied about you." Her face was turned from him, in the dusk of the crickets, toward the wooded amphitheater, where dead Pontius roved wild-eyed in the dusk, where Lazarus tossed uneasily in his second sleep, where the Greeks lay in alien soil, and the shadows of Roman legionaries looked puzzled at the flat sea, not recognizing busy Tiber--her back was to him, her head up in pain, her nerve-wrenched hands uneasy, white....