What she had the power to do was to awake in him sensations, sensations of mystery and of charm, sensations of the rare moods of nature and of the night, sensations that brought the youth of the artist thronging back to him. Of this he spoke to her frankly, trying to make her understand. It was one evening, when a sudden squall was whistling under the doors, and the rain pellets, wind-driven, were rattling against the windows. They were before the fire-place, the dishes cleaned for the night, watching the glow of charring logs, Inga stretched full-length on the rug, her elbows on the floor, chin in her hands, Dangerfield rocking back, drawing long clouds of fragrant smoke from his pipe. He watched her (he never tired of studying her instinctive poses) with a sense of eye-delight. There was something feline and pliant in her contemplation of the fire, the wonder one sees in a graceful animal fascinated by a burning flame which lies beyond the world of its comprehension. Inga, to him, was a constant source of pleasant sensations and unfathomed surprises. He rose and laid a stick on the red ruins, cities and palaces in miniature, and returned to his seat, as the stick caught fire and sent its fluttering shadows into the room.

“Feels good to be here, wind and rain outside, fire and shelter, inside—that’s home,” he said. She nodded without turning, divining that he felt like talking to himself. Presently he said, as though appreciative of her intuition:

“Good work to-day. I’ll make something big out of that sketch, that inlet seen through the mist—bully skyline, and taken just from the right spot. There’s something going on in me, the power to feel effects, not simply to transcribe them—thanks to you. You’ve done a bigger thing than just getting hold of me, Inga; you’ve given me back the power of sensations—that’s youth, that’s the artist. Well, to be an artist is to retain youth, I suppose, the ability to receive sensations. You’ve got that instinct yourself, primitive, savage, but it’s there in everything you do. And I get it from you, from watching you, from feeling through your eyes. That’s the big thing—to feed me with sensations. You see that’s what civilization has taken from us, the power of sensations, passion, love, hate, fear—all great sensations of the artist. Civilization steps in and fences us about; passion exists only when it is a destructive force; love even—blind, romantic love—civilization has turned into an economical partnership; hatred, the fierce, cleansing passion to destroy, is taken from us, even fear, the greatest of all, the fear of great unknown nature and hidden voices in the sky, the sea and the woods, the terror of the night when the other world may return—civilization has deprived us of that, too, by explaining it. Civilization is constantly at war with our elemental nature. But to the artist, the elemental, the world of the instincts and sensations is the world of creation. That’s why we break through conventions, why we seem constantly in revolt against society—the need of sensation. To convey, one must be keen to receive—Too abstruse? Well, that’s what I am living in, reveling in now—yes, for the first time in my life.”

She listened, her large eyes intent on him, her brows a little drawn, nodding when he came to an end. Yet he wondered. He had a queer, half-humorous feeling that she had understood nothing, and yet that she was industriously storing away his words, as a squirrel buries food against the winter, for some further use—for some other queer turn of her existence.

At the bottom, he was content that she should acquiesce and not discuss, that she lay before him in a languid, graceful picture looking out at him from eyes that were like the uttermost sea. With her, he felt absolutely, pleasantly alone with himself, in a stimulating self-communion, his imagination rekindled, his mind taking flame with new ideas. And this mental fertilization was due, as he himself acknowledged, to the charm of his existence with her, to the curiosity she had awakened in him with the abrupt releasing of riotous, youthful nature, even as a wild grace and glory had come into her eyes with the liberty of her released hair, which came tumbling and turning about her slender, dark face. Sometimes, when she stood on the edge of a cliff, she flung her hair completely free, her head thrown back, her throat bared, lying back on the arms of the wind.

“What a trick civilization has played on her!” he thought, at such times. “She should be a bride of a Viking rover, not of me.”

One night, in mid-August, when every leaf lay flat upon the torpid air, he awoke with a restless sense of loss. The room rose luminous in the flood of moonlight. He turned to the couch at his side. It was empty.

“Inga?” he said softly.

Then he repeated his call, and there was no answering sound. He did not feel alarm, knowing well her moods, but, being wakeful, he felt a curiosity to know where her impulse had taken her. He rose and stood a moment at the threshold in the warm night. From where he stood, the cove lay revealed, the mellow sands and the back of the cliff, inky there in the frown of the full moon which flooded the shore, the water, and the dominion of the air above him. Then he went quietly up the path, and stole over the bank. Below, in the phosphorescent waters that rose luminously over her white body, Inga was floating over the long, slow, in-drifting swell. He moved down cautiously in the deep shadows, careful to make no sound, taking his seat on a projecting ledge. Below, the sanded strip lay glistening like an Arabian Nights’ field of jewels.

It was hot and so still that every movement in the air was arrested; even the twisted bulk of the moon and the few pallid stars which showed seemed drowsy with sleep, in an unnatural sleep, a slumber laid upon the night by witchcraft. She lay upon the back of the scarcely stirring sea, her body a confused and softened mass against the green-black depth and the ripple of the phosphorus which ran over her, glistening in swarming fiery multitudes at a movement of her feet or hands, was like a gossamer of beaded gold outlining the slender limbs. She floated, her arms outstretched, her head turned upward in the full glitter of the moon, her black hair, like sea-grasses floating about the dim oval of her face, and so immobile was her pose, so devoid of anything physical, that he felt as he sat there and watched her, that he had surprised a pagan nymph, stealing back in the silences of a hostile world, to worship in ecstasy pale Diana, goddess of the night.

He remained silent, scarcely drawing a breath for fear of being heard, in a sort of devotional ecstasy also. Before him was the mystery of timeless nature, of forbidden spaces, of the great innocent body of the world which each night returns to its maidenly solitude and waits serene the moment when the transient horde of men shall pass, and the day again shall wrap her in silence and in solitude, even as the unconquered night. Under his eyes lay the mystery of the living flesh, of the spark of life which meant Woman to him—Woman, the glowing atom which had drifted hither and thither and settled a moment into his arms, to wake all his faculties, all his emotions and all his aspirations, and at the end of all this tireless giving to remain—undivined. What did he know of her even now—of this woman whom the world called his, whence she had come or where she would end.

“If I should die this year or the next, what would be her life?” he thought, and, for a moment, he strove profoundly to tear aside the heavy fold of the future. He saw her attaching herself again to some man, of that he was certain, obeying some divine impulse to accomplish her purpose, and the thought of that other man of the future filled him with a restless melancholy.

“The truth is,” he said to himself, “love as much as we can, we remain always alone, alone in the things we do not dare to tell each other, alone by the barrier the future lays between us. After me—what?”

All at once over the surface of the water, there came a sudden dripping shower of sparks. Inga turned to the shore, her body growing out of the waters as the goddess herself once rose to beauty and to life. Before the incomparable beauty of the scene he could not restrain an exclamation. She sprang to the shore and turned, frightened.

“Inga!” he cried hastily.

Instantly she turned and fled over the jeweled beach, bounding away like a young deer, while back over her shoulder came her laugh, gay and tantalizing. He sprang up in turn, with a sudden, impetuous rage to pursue and overtake her, and then quickly checked himself and resumed his seat. Presently, after long minutes, he heard a light crunching in the sand behind him and the next moment her moist hands closed over his eyes.

“Do you think I’m an awful person?” she cried, laughing.

He turned and caught her yielding body, soft and pliant in the folds of a great bathrobe, and drew her down into his arms.

“So that’s what you do when you get Bluebeard fast asleep,” he said, with a laugh in his throat which she knew.

She nodded, and her arms stole up and around him.

“What were you thinking of?” he said, after a moment, wondering what thoughts had been in her as she lay in the contemplation of the luminous night.

“I? I was thinking how delicious it was.” She stopped, laughed a little, and added, “Must I tell—well, then—how delicious it was to bathe all alone away from every one, with no clothes on!”

“Was that all?” he said, with a sudden disillusionment. But instantly he added: “No; that wasn’t it—that’s a fib. What was behind those eyes, Inga, witch from the sea?”

She shook her head with feigned ignorance. Yet about her lips there floated a strange, wistful smile, and her eyes, as they watched him, seemed to have depths as forbidding as the night about them.