even speak again of
writing to each other.

They found once more the little semicircle of blackberry bushes and the
fallen log, half-way up the hill above the shore, and sat there a
while, looking down upon the long green rollers, marching incessantly
toward the beach, and there breaking in a prolonged explosion of solid
green water and flying spume. And their glance followed their
succeeding ranks further and further out to sea, till the multitude
blended into the mass--the vast, green, shifting mass that drew the eye
on and on, to the abrupt, fine line of the horizon.

There was no detail in the scene. There was nothing but the great
reach of the ocean floor, the unbroken plane of blue sky, and the bare
green slope of land--three immensities, gigantic, vast, primordial. It
was no place for trivial ideas and thoughts of little things. The mind
harked back unconsciously to the broad, simpler, basic emotions, the
fundamental instincts of the race. The huge spaces of earth and air
and water carried with them a feeling of kindly but enormous
force--elemental force, fresh, untutored, new, and young. There was
buoyancy in it; a fine, breathless sense of uplifting and exhilaration;
a sensation as of bigness and a return to the homely, human, natural
life, to the primitive old impulses, irresistible, changeless, and
unhampered; old as the ocean, stable as the hills, vast as the
unplumbed depths of the sky.

Condy and Blix sat still, listening, looking, and watching--the
intellect drowsy and numb; the emotions, the senses, all alive and
brimming to the surface. Vaguely they felt the influence of the
moment. Something was preparing for them. From the lowest, untouched
depths in the hearts of each of them something was rising steadily to
consciousness and the light of day. There is no name for such things,
no name for the mystery that spans the interval between man and
woman--the mystery that bears no relation to their love for each other,
but that is something better than love, and whose coming savors of the
miraculous.

The afternoon had waned and the sun had begun to set when Blix rose.

"We should be going, Condy," she told him.

They started up the hill, and Condy said: "I feel as though I had been
somehow asleep with my eyes wide open. What a glorious sunset! It
seems to me as though I were living double every minute; and oh! Blix,
isn't it the greatest thing in the world to love each other as we do?"