"The sea is wide and uncertain."
Her full cheek, with its emphatic curve, was almost gaunt in the moment
when she fixed her eyes on the wolfish face of that tousle-headed giant
who encircled her. Her shoulder blades were pinched back; the line of
the marvelous full throat lengthened; she devoured the man with a
vehemence of love, brief and fierce as the summer lightning which played
below the dark horizon.
She was gone, planting that aerial foot willfully in the dust. Raindrops
ticked from one to another of the broad, green leaves over the harbor
master's head. Water might be heard frothing in a nearby cistern.
Suddenly the moon glittered on the parson's birch-wood pile, and slanted
a beam under the Preaching Tree. Sunk in the thick dust which the rain
had slightly stippled in slow droppings, he saw the tender prints of a
bare foot and the cruel tracks of the seaman's great, square-toed boots
pointing together toward the sea.
He raised his eyes only with a profound effort. They encountered a
blackboard affixed to the fat trunk of the Preaching Tree, on which from
day to day the parson wrote the text for its preachments in colored
chalk. The moon was full upon it, and Rackby saw in crimson lettering
the words, "Woman, hath no man damned thee?" The rest of the text he
had rubbed out with his own shoulders in turning to take the girl into
his arms.
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