men. The fact that, penniless and without a home, he had nothing to offer was lost in the beat and surge of his feelings. He went with the smashing completeness of a heavy body, broken loose in an elemental turmoil. He wanted her; her fragrant spirit, the essence that was herself, Rosemary Roselle. He couldn't take it; such consummations, he realized, were beyond will and act, they responded from planes forever above human desire—there was not even a rift of hope. The banks had been long lost in the night; the faint disembodied cry of an owl breathed across the invisible river.
She woke with a little confused cry, and sat gazing distractedly into the dark, her hands pressed to her cheeks.
"Don't you remember," Elim Meikeljohn spoke, "Haxall and the sloop; your relatives at Bramant's Wharf?"
She returned to a full consciousness of her surroundings.
"I was dreaming so differently," she told him. It seemed to Elim that the antagonism had departed from her voice; he even had a feeling that she was glad of his presence. Indy, prostrate on the deck with her chin elevated to the stars, had not moved.
The darkness increased, broken only by the colored glimmer of the port and starboard lights and a wan blur about the old man bent over the tiller. Once he woke the youth and sent him forward with a sounding pole, once the sloop scraped heavily over a mud bank, but that was all; their imperceptible progress was smooth, unmarked.
Elim, recalling Joshua, wished that the sloop and night
