strange solitary was not insane nor visionary. He was never in
spirit alone. For night and day, sleeping or waking, pacing the
beach or crouching over his driftwood fire, a woman's face was
always before him,--the face for whose sake and for cause of whom
he sat there alone. He saw it in the morning sunlight; it was her
white hands that were lifted from the crested breakers; it was the
rustling of her skirt when the sea wind swept through the beach
grasses; it was the loving whisper of her low voice when the long
waves sank and died among the sedge and rushes. She was as
omnipresent as sea and sky and level sand. Hence when the fog
wiped them away, she seemed to draw closer to him in the darkness.
On one or two more gracious nights in midsummer, when the influence
of the fervid noonday sun was still felt on the heated sands, the
warm breath of the fog touched his cheek as if it had been hers,
and the tears started to his eyes.

Before the fogs came--for he arrived there in winter--he had found
surcease and rest in the steady glow of a lighthouse upon the
little promontory a league below his habitation. Even on the
darkest nights, and in the tumults of storm, it spoke to him of a
patience that was enduring and a steadfastness that was immutable.
Later on he found a certain dumb companionship in an uprooted tree,
which, floating down the river, had stranded hopelessly upon his
beach, but in the evening had again drifted away. Rowing across
the estuary a day or two afterward, he recognized the tree again
from a "blaze" of the settler's axe still upon its trunk. He was
not surprised a week later to find the same tree in the sands
before his dwelling, or that the next morning it should be again
launched on its purposeless wanderings. And so, impelled by wind
or tide, but always haunting his seclusion, he would meet it