“Adam, the day is breaking.  The tide must be on the turn.  Shan’t we go?”

He stood up with the gesture of an old man.  “What’s the good?” he said.  “Do you think I want to see my boy’s dead body left behind by the sea?”

She shivered at the question.  “But we can’t stay here,” she urged.  “Aunt Liza, you know—­she’ll be wondering.”

“Ah!” He passed his hand over his eyes.  He was swaying a little as he stood.  She supported his elbow, for he seemed to have lost control of his limbs.  He stared at her in a dazed way.  “You’d better go and tell your Aunt Liza,” he said.  “I think I’ll stay here a bit longer.  Maybe my boy’ll come and talk to me if I’m alone.  We’re partners, you know, and we lived here a good many years alone together.  He wouldn’t leave me—­not for the long voyage—­without a word.  Yes, you go, my dear, you go!  I’ll stay here and wait for him.”

She saw that no persuasion of hers would move him, and it seemed useless to remain.  An intolerable restlessness urged her, moreover, to be gone.  The awful inertia of the past two hours had turned into a fevered desire for action.  It was the swing of the pendulum, and she felt that if she did not respond to it she would go mad.

Her knees were still trembling under her, but she controlled them and turned to the door.  As she lifted the latch she looked back and saw Adam drop heavily into the chair upon which he had leaned for so long.  His attitude was one of almost stubborn patience, but it was evident that her presence had ceased to count with him.  He was waiting—­she saw it clearly in every line of him—­waiting to bid his boy Godspeed ere he fared forth finally on the long voyage from which there is no return.

A sharp sob rose in her throat.  She caught her hand to it, forcing it back.  Then, barefooted, she stepped out into the grey dimness that veiled all things, and left the door of Rufus’s cottage open behind her.

CHAPTER X

THE LONG VOYAGE

She never remembered afterwards how she accomplished the homeward journey.  The rough stones cut her feet again and again, but she never felt the pain.  She went as one who has an urgent mission to perform, though what that mission was she scarcely knew.

The night—­that night of dreadful tragedy—­had changed her.  Columbine, the passionate, the impulsive had turned into a being that was foreign to herself.  All the happy girlhood had been stamped out of her as by the cruel pressure of a hot iron.  She had ceased to feel the agony of it; somehow she did not think that she ever could feel pain again.  The nerve tissues had been destroyed and all vitality was gone.  The creature that passed like a swift shadow through the twilight of the dawn was an old and withered woman who had lived beyond her allotted time.

She reached the old Ship Inn, meeting no one.  She entered by the door of the conservatory through which she had flitted aeons and aeons before to meet her lover.  She went to her room and changed into her own clothes.  The suit that had belonged to Rufus so long ago she laid away with an odd reverence, still scarcely knowing what she did, driven as it were by a mechanism that worked without any volition of hers.