Then she went to the glass and began to coil up her hair.  It was dank and heavy yet with the seawater, but she wound it about her head without noticing.  The light was growing, and she peered at herself with a detached sort of curiosity, till something in her own eyes frightened her, and she turned away.

She went to the window and opened it wide.  The sound of the sea yet filled the world, but it was not so insistent as it had been.  The waves, though mountainous still, were gradually receding from the shore.  It was as though the dawn had come just in time to prevent the powers of darkness from triumphing.

She heard someone moving in the house and turned back into the room.  Aunt Liza must be told.

Through the spectral dawnlight she went down the stairs and took her way to the kitchen.  The door stood half open; she heard the cheery crackling of the newly lighted fire before she entered.  And hearing it, she was aware of a great coldness that clung like a chain, fettering her every movement.

Someone moved as she pushed open the door.  An enormous shadow leaped upon the wall like a fantastic monster of the deep.  She recoiled for a second, then, as if drawn against her will, she entered.

By the ruddy glow of the fire she saw a man’s broad-chested figure, she saw the gleam of tawny hair above a thick bull-neck.  He was bending slightly over the fire at her entrance, but, hearing her, he turned.  And in that moment every numbed nerve in Columbine’s body was pierced into quivering life.

She stood as one transfixed, and he stood motionless also in the flickering light of the flames, gazing at her with eyes of awful blue that were as burning spirit.  But he spoke not a word—­not a word.  How could a dead man speak?

And as they stood thus, facing each other, the floor between them began suddenly to heave, became a mass of seething billows that rocked her, caught her, engulfed her.  She went down into them, and as the tossing darkness received her, her last thought was that Rufus had come back indeed—­not to say farewell, but to take her with him on the long voyage from which there is no return....

CHAPTER XI

DEEP WATERS

Wild white roses that grew in the sandy stubble above the shore, little orange-scented roses that straggled through the grass—­they called to something that ran in Columbine’s blood, they spoke to her of the South.  She was sure that she would find those roses all about her feet when she came to the end of the long voyage.  She would see their golden hearts wide open to the sun.  For their fragrance haunted her day by day as she floated down the long glassy stretches and rocked on the waveless swells.

Sometimes she had a curious fancy that she was lying dead, and they had strewn the sweet flowers all about her.  She hoped that they might not be buried with her; they were too beautiful for that.