All were now ready to seek the harbor. A light westerly wind was still blowing, with the aid of which, heavy-laden, they crept slowly to the land. As she lay snug and warm, with the cool breath of the sea on her face, a half sleep came over Clementina, and she half dreamed that she was voyaging in a ship of the air, through infinite regions of space, with a destination too glorious to be known. The herring-boat was a living splendor of strength and speed, its sails were as the wings of a will in place of the instruments of a force, and softly as mightily it bore them through the charmed realms of Dreamland toward the ideal of the soul. And yet the herring-boat but crawled over the still waters with its load of fish, as the harvest-wagon creeps over the field with its piled-up sheaves; and she who imagined its wondrous speed was the only one who did not desire it should move faster. No word passed between her and Malcolm all their homeward way. Each was brooding over the night and its joy that enclosed them together, and hoping for that which was yet to be shaken from the lap of the coming time.
Also, Clementina had in her mind a scheme for attempting what Malcolm had requested of her: the next day must see it carried into effect, and ever and anon, like a cold blast of doubt invading the bliss of confidence, into the heart of that sea-borne peace darted the thought that if she failed she must leave at once for England, for she would not again meet Liftore.
At last they glided once more through the stony jaws of the harbor, as if returning again to the earth from a sojourn in the land of the disembodied. When Clementina's foot touched the shore she felt like one waked out of a dream, from whom yet the dream has not departed, but keeps floating about him, waved in thinner and yet thinner streams from the wings of the vanishing sleep. It seemed almost as if her spirit, instead of having come back to the world of its former abode, had been borne across the parting waters and landed on the shore of the immortals. There was the ghostlike harbor of the spirit-land, the water gleaming betwixt its dark walls, one solitary boat motionless upon it, the men moving about like shadows in the star twilight. Here stood three women and a man on the shore, and save the stars no light shone, and from the land came no sound of life. Was it the dead of the night or a day that had no sun? It was not dark, but the light was rayless. Or rather it was as if she had gained the power of seeing in the dark. Suppressed sleep wove the stuff of a dream around her, and the stir at her heart kept it alive with dream-forms. Even the voice of Peter's Annie, saying, "I s' bide for my man.--Gude-nicht, my leddy," did not break the charm. Her heart shaped that also into the dream. Turning away with Malcolm and Lizzy, she passed along the front of the Seaton. How still, how dead, how empty like cenotaphs, all the cottages looked! How the sea, which lay like a watcher at their doors, murmured in its sleep! Arrived at the entrance to her own close, Lizzy next bade them good-night, and Clementina and Malcolm were left.