straining upon the warp, the schooner
was floated off, and under touch of the lightest airs drew almost
imperceptibly away from the land. They were quite an hour crawling out
to the heads of the bay. But here the breeze was freshening. Moran
took the wheel; the flying-jib and staysail were set; the wake began to
whiten under the schooner's stern, the forefoot sang; the Pacific opened
out more and more; and by 12:30 o'clock Moran put the wheel over, and,
as the schooner's bow swung to the northward, cried to Wilbur:

"Mate, look your last of Magdalena Bay!"

Standing at her side, Wilbur turned and swept the curve of the coast
with a single glance. The vast, heat-scourged hoop of yellow sand, the
still, smooth shield of indigo water, with its beds of kelp, had become
insensibly dear to him. It was all familiar, friendly, and hospitable.
Hardly an acre of that sweep of beach that did not hold the impress of
his foot. There was the point near by the creek where he and Moran first
landed to fill the water-casks and to gather abalones; the creek itself,
where he had snared quail; the sand spit with its whitened whale's
skull, where he and Moran had beached the schooner; and there, last
of all, that spot of black over which still hung a haze of brown-gray
smoke, the charred ruins of the old Portuguese whaling-cabin, where they
had outfought the beach-combers.

For a moment Wilbur and Moran looked back without speaking. They stood
on the quarter-deck; in the shadow of the main-sail, shut off from the
sight of the schooner's crew, and for the instant quite alone.

"Well, Moran, it's good-by to the old places, isn't it?" said Wilbur at
length.

"Yes," she said, her deep voice pitched even deeper than usual. "Mate,
great things have happened there."

"It doesn't look like a place for a Tong row with Chinese pirates,
though, does it?" he said; but even as he spoke the words, he guessed
that that was not what he meant.

"Oh, what did that amount to?" she said, with an impatient movement of
her head. "It was there that I first knew myself; and knew that, after
all, you were a man and I was a woman; and that there was just us--you
and I--in the world; and that you loved me and I loved you, and that
nothing else was worth thinking of."

Wilbur shut his hand down over hers as it gripped a spoke of the wheel.

"Moran, I knew that long since," he said. "Such a month as this has
been! Why, I feel as though I had only begun to li