“But you gave me your promise to do exactly as I bade you. I am older than you,” said Marianson.
“I know what is best, and that is that you remain here until I come. Swear to me that you will.”
He was silent, beseeching her with his eyes to relent. Then, owning her right to dominate, he pledged her by the name of his saint to do as she required.
Their forced companionship, begun at daylight, was ending as darkness crept through the cavern's mouth. They waited, and those last moments of silence, while they leaned to look closely at each other with the night growing between them, were a benediction on the day.
Marianson stooped to creep through the cavern's mouth, but once more she turned and looked at him, and it was she herself who stretched appealing arms. The boy's shyness and the woman's aversion to men vanished as in fire. They stood together in the hollow of the cave in one long embrace. He sought her mouth and kissed her, and, suffocating with joy, she escaped through the low door.
Indifferent to the Indian who might be dogging her, she drew her strip of home-spun around her face and ran, moccasined and deft-footed, over the stones, warm, palpitating, and laughing, full of physical hardihood. In the woods, on her left, she knew there were rocks splashed with stain black as ink and crusted with old lichens. On her right white-caps were running before the west wind and diving like ducks on the strait. She crossed the threads of a brook ravelling themselves from density. For the forest was a mask. But Marianson knew well the tricks of that brook--its pellucid shining on pebbles, its cascades, its hidings underground of all but a voice and a crystal pool. Wet to her knees, she had more than once followed it to its source amid such greenery of moss and logs as seemed a conflagration of verdure.
The many points and bays of the island sped behind her, and cliffs crowded her to the water's edge or left her a dim moving object on a lonesome beach. Sometimes she heard sounds in the woods and listened; on the other hand, she had the companionship of stars and moving water. On that glorified journey Marianson's natural fearlessness carried her past the Devil's Kitchen and quite near the post before she began to consider how it was best to approach a place which might be in the hands of an enemy. Her boat was tied at the dock. She had the half-ruined distillery yet to pass. It had stood under the cliff her lifetime. As she drew nearer, cracks of light and a hum like the droning of a beehive magically turned the old distillery into a caravansary of spirits.