When Tess came home to supper that night she was all changed again: her looks gay once more, and her step light, and a sort of flutter about her lips—as if she was wanting to smile and was trying not to—and a soft look in her eyes that I never had seen there, but knew the meaning of and found the worst of all.  
I couldn't eat my supper; and got up presently and went out leaving it—my mother looking after me wondering—and walked up and down on the cliff-edge in the darkness with my heart all in a blaze of hate for John. For a good while I had been looking for what I knew was in the way of coming to me; but it was different, and worse, and hurt more than I had counted on, when at last it came. Out there in the darkness I staid until the night was well on—not wanting for a while to hear the sound of[210] Tess's voice nor to lay eyes on her. Not until I was sure, by the lights being out in the house, that she'd gone to bed, did I go in again. My mother was waiting waking for me. She came to me in the dark and put her arms around me and kissed me; by which I knew that Tess had been telling her—and knew, too, she always having looked to the wedding of us, that her heart was sore along with mine. But I could not bear even her soft touch on the hurt that I had. I just kissed her back again and broke away from her and went to bed. And in the very early morning, not having slept much, I slipped out of the house before either she or Tess was stirring and down to my boat and so away to sea.
 
What I was after was to get some quiet time to myself that would steady me before I had things out with John. I was not clear in my mind how I meant to settle with him. I did know, though, that I meant to have some sort of a fair fight with him that would end in my killing him or in him killing me—and I knew that to tackle him with my head all in a buzz would be to throw too many chances his way. And so I got away in my boat, at the day-dawn, to the sea's quietness: where I could clear my head of[211] the buzzing that was in it and put some sort of shape to my plans.
 
Had I been in my sober senses that morning I never should have gone away seaward at all. Backing up the promise of the yellow sunset of the night before, pink clouds were showing in the eastern sky as I started; and as I sailed on in loneliness—standing straight out from the land on a soft leading wind from the south-west westerly—the pink turned to a pale red and then to a deep red, and at last the sun came up out of the water a great ball of fire. The look of the sea, too, all in an oily bubble, and the set of the ground-swell, told me plain enough—even without the sunrise fairly shouting it in the ears of me—that a change of wind was coming before mid-day, and that pretty soon after the wind shifted it would be blowing a gale.
 
I will say this, though: If I'd missed seeing the red sunrise—and all the more if I'd been full of happiness and my wits gone a wool-gathering—I might have thought from the look and the feel of the water, and from the set of the high clouds, that the wind would not blow to hurt anything for a good twelve hours. That much I'll say by way of excuse for John. Like enough he slept late that morning—through ly[212]ing awake the night before thinking what he'd be likely to think—and so missed seeing the sun's warning. When he did get away in his boat it was well past eight o'clock; and there was no man on the beach when he started, so they told me, to counsel him. And, all being said, even a good sailor—and that John was—starting off as he was to buy a wedding-ring might not look as sharp as he ought to look at the sea and at the sky.
 
As to my own sailing seaward—I seeing the storm-signals and knowing the meaning of them—I have no more to say than that I was hot for a fight with anything that morning, and didn't care much what I had it with or how it came. Anybody who knows how to sail a boat, and to sail one well, kno............