Her mind, thus liberated from its own burdens, ran here and there over the landscape, inventing a romantic situation for each pictorial spot.  Under the black tree on the island she said good-bye to a lover whom she made not in the least like Richard, because she thought it probable later in the story he would meet a violent death.  A man fled over the marsh before an avenger who, when the quarry tripped on the dyke’s edge, buried a knife between his shoulders; and, as he struck, a woman lit the lamp in the window of the island farm, to tell the murdered man that it was safe to come.  Indeed, that farm was a red rag to the imagination.  Perhaps a sailor’s widow with some sorceress blood had gone to live there, so that the ghost of her drowned husband might have less far to travel when he obeyed her nightly evocations.

“Who lives in that little house on the island?” she called out to Marion.

“The one on the Saltings?  No one.  It has been empty for forty years.  But when I was a child George Luck still lived there.  George Luck, the last great wizard in England.”

“A wizard forty years ago!  Well, I suppose parts of England are very backward.  You’ve got such a miserable system of education.  What sort of magic did he do?”

“Oh, he gave charms to cure sick cattle, and sailors’ wives used to come to him for news of their absent husbands, and he used to make them look in a full tub of water, and they used to see little pictures of what the men were doing at the time.”  She laughed over her shoulder at Ellen.  “You see, other women before us have been reactionary.”

“Reactionary?” repeated Ellen.

“They have let their lives revolve round men,” said Marion teasingly, and Ellen returned her laughter.  They were both in high spirits because of this wind that was salt and cold and yet not savage.  Their glowing bodies reminded them that the prime necessities of life are earth and air, and the chance to eat well as they had eaten, and that in being in love they were the victims of a classic predicament, the current participators in the perpetual imbroglio with spiritual things that makes man the most ridiculous of animals.

They were walking on the level now, on a path beside the railway-line, again in the great green platter of the marshes.  The sea-wall, which ran in wide crimps a field’s width away on the other side of the line, might have been the rim of the world had it not been for the forest of masts showing above it.  The clouds declared themselves the inhabitants of the sky and not its stuff by casting separate shadows, and the space they moved in seemed a reservoir of salt light, of fluid silence, under which it was good to live.  Yet it was not silence, for there came perpetually that leisurely, wet cry.

“What are those birds?  They make a lovely sound,” asked Ellen, dancing.