dropping them, very gently, at the nearest port. Poor Manby!
And it would be his own turn next. And yet Georgie had said, "You
never know." He must and would know; at any rate, he would take his
chance. Meanwhile, he had a whole hour before him to find out in,
for the crew had commissions in the town. That hour was Frida's and
his own.

The two weeks had gone he knew not how; and yet he had taken
count of the procession of the days. Days of clouds, when, under a
drenching mist, the land was sodden into the likeness of the sea,
the sea stilled into a leaden image of the land; days of rain, when
the wet decks shone like amber, and the sea's face was smoothed out
and pitted by the showers; days of sun, when they went with every
sail spread, over a warm, quivering sea, whose ripples bore the
shivered reflections of the sky in so many blue flames that leaped
and danced with the _Windward_ in her course; days of wind, when
the Channel was a race of tumultuous waves, green-hearted,
silver-lipped, swelling and breaking and swelling, and flowering
into foam, days when the yacht careened over with steep decks, laid
between wind and water, flush with the foam, driven by the wind as
by her soul; days when Durant and Frida, who delighted in rough
weather, sat out together on deck alone. They knew every sound of
that marvelous world, sounds of the calm, of water lapping against
the yacht's side, the tender, half-audible caress of the sea;
sounds of the coming gale, more seen than heard, more felt than
seen, the deep, long-drawn shudder of the sea when the wind's path
is as the rain's path; and that sound, the song of her soul, the
keen, high, exultant song that the wind sings, playing on her
shrouds as on a many-stringed instrument. The boat, in her unrest,
rolling, tossing, wheeling and flying, was herself so alive, so one
with the moving wind and water, and withal so slight a shell for
the humanity within her, that she had brought them, the man and the
woman, nearer and nearer to the heart of being; they touched
through her the deep elemental forces of the world. The sea had
joined what the land had kept asunder. At this last hour of
Durant's last day they were drifting rather than sailing past a
sunken shore, a fringe of gray slate, battered by the tide and
broken into thin layers, with edges keen as knives; above it, low
woods of dwarf oaks stretched northward, gray and phantasmal as the
shore, stunted and tortured into writhin