ve with Moyra Dolan? He was in love
with her, he conceded that. For what the term was accepted at, he was in
love with her. Women he had met in his twenty years, great ladies of the
Ulster clans; shy, starched misses from the Friends' School; moody
peasant girls; merry women of the foreign ports, and to none of them had
he felt that strange yearning he had felt toward Moyra Dolan, the
strange pull that sends the twig in the diviner's hands down toward the
hidden water. Yes, he was in love with her, but was it because of that
he had married her? And he truthfully answered, no.

He remembered, the mood coming back to him as concretely as an action,
what he had thought while the old woman had wheedled him with her voice
like butter. All he had thought in his prentice days at sea, all he had
thought of in the night watches, all he had thought of in the loneliness
of his mother's house, had gathered like great cloud-banks at night, and
had suddenly taken form and color and purpose in that one moment, as a
cloud-bank at the coming of the sun.... Life had appeared to him in one
brief moment, and he had tried to grasp it.

It had seemed to him right that he would go down to the sea in ships all
his days, and trade in foreign ports, and work, transmuting effort into
gain, and should come home to rest.

And for whom was the gain? And where was home? Surely not for himself
was the gain, and home was not his cold mother's house? And now that he
had come to manhood as boys come at sea, braving danger and thinking
mightily, it was for him to decide.

A mirage, a seeming, a thing to look at, to go get bravely had come into
his mind in little pictures, like prints in a book. A thing of
simplicity, simple as the sea, and as colorful and as wholesome and as
beautiful. He thought of a little thatched and whitewashed house with a
cobbled yard clean as a ship's decks, and a garden where the bluish
green stalks and absurdly pretty flowers of potatoes would come in
spring, and one side would be the red and white of the clover, and on
the other would be the minute blue flower of the flax; and an old dog
drowsing on the threshold.... And this would be in his mind as he
wandered the hot foreign streets.... And there would be the droning of
the bees in the clover, and the swish of the swallows darting to and
from the eaves, and in the evening would be the singing of the
crickets.... And these he would hear over the capstan's clank.... When
he