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The loss of the Jean on Ealan Dubh had sundered him for ever from his life of voyaging. The distant ports in whose dusks wild beasts roared and spices filled the air were far back in another life for him; even the little trips to the Clyde were, in the regrets of memory, experiences most precious.
France, far off in sunshine, brimming with laughter and song, its thousand interests, its innumerable happy associations, were of little account to the fact that now he was in the castle of Doom, under the same roof with a woman who charmed magic flutes, who endowed the dusks with mystery and surprise.
He went into his public room, and "Mary," he cried to a maid, "a little drop of the French for Sergeant Cameron and me. You will allow me, Sergeant? I feel a little need of an evening brace." And he drank, for the sake of bygone dusks, with his customer. Nan and Gilian now walked on the pavement, a discreet distance apart. She stopped at the mantua-makers door.
And that too was well. A smile would have lowered her, brought her down from her superb distance. His happiness choked him. She was the embodiment of everything that he had heard pass in the distance from the silent dusks of Acacia Grove splendour and power, laughter and music, the beat of a secret pulse answering the tread of invisible processions.
I remember one smoky moon, and there was a certain dawn in which I loved, more strangely than ever, the cut-leaved profile against the grey-red East. The spirit of it seemed to come to me, and all that the elm-tree meant hill-cabins and country dusks, bees and blooms and stars, and the plain holy life of kindliness and aspiration.
Until yesterday, almost, she had regarded the various chairs of the house as beings endowed with life and character; she had held conversations with some, and, with a careless exterior not warranted by an inner dread, avoided others in gloomy dusks. All this, now, she contemptuously discarded. Chairs were chairs, things to sit on, wood and stuffed cushions.
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