Another look came to his eyes. Another light began to burn in their blue depths.
“Geyser Rock!” he whispered. “By God, the very place!”
Geyser Rock boldly fronts the unbroken sweep of the sea at Thunder Head. Up it leaps, sheer two hundred feet, from great deeps. Fifty feet from the barnacle-crusted line of high-tide a ledgelike path leads to the face of the cliff. From this ledge Hal often took the plunge that had won him local fame—a plunge into frothing surf that even in the calmest of midsummer days was never still.
Few visitors ever struggle up through sumacs, brakes and undergrowth, to gain the vantage-point of the pinnacle. Rolling boulders, slippery ledge and dizzying overlook upon the shining sea deter all but the hardy. The very solitude of the place had greatly endeared it to Hal. To him it was often a solace and a comfort after his strange fits of rage and viciousness.
All alone, up in that isolated height, he had passed long hours reading, smoking, musing in the tiny patch of grass there under the canopy of the white-birches’ filigree of green, or under the huge pine that carpeted the north slope of the crest with odorous, russet spills. Some of his happiest hours had been spent on the summit, through the tree-tops watching sky-shepherds tend their flocks across the pastures infinitely far and blue above him.
Strangely secluded was the top of Geyser Rock. Though it lay hardly a pistol-shot from the main coast-road, it seemed almost as isolated as if it had been down among the Celebes.
For that reason Hal loved it best of all, with its grasses, flowers, ferns and tangled thickets, its rock-ridges filigreed with silvery lichens or sparkling with white quartz-crystals. From this aerie Hal could glimpse a bit of the village; the prim church spire; the tiny, far gravestones sleeping on Croft Hill. The solitude of this, his own domain by right of conquest, had grown ever more dear and needful to him as he had advanced toward manhood.
Such was the place toward which Laura and he were now walking along the road, with tilled fields and rock-bossed rolling hills to right of them; and, to their left, the restless flashings of the sea.
Laura had never been more charming. Her happiness in his return had flushed her cheeks with color and had brightened her eyes—thoughtful, deep, loyal eyes—till they looked clear and fresh as summer skies after rain.