her. It gave her a strange sense of lightheartedness. Her
heart warmed with love to the sight of the purple tint in the eastern
sky, that bluish purple which precedes the yellow sunrise. On either
side of her boat now the water was so shallow that sedge and rushes rose
above it.

The herons flapped across her path to their morning fishing.

The creek still made a narrow channel for the canoe. Pretty soon its
current flowed between wild undulating tracts of bright green moss in
which the trees still stood dead, but bark and lichen now adhered to
their trunks, and a few more strokes brought her to the fringes of young
spruce and balsam that grew upon the drier knolls. She smelt living
trees, dry woods and pastures in front. Then a turn of the narrow creek,
and she saw a log-house standing not twenty paces from the stream. Above
and around it maples and elms held out green branches, and there was
some sort of a clearing farther on.

Ann felt exultant in her triumph. She had brought her boat to a place of
safety. She seemed to gather life and strength from the sun; although it
still lay below the blue horizon of lake and forest which she had left
behind her, the sky above was a gulf of sunshine.

She stepped out of the boat and pushed away the hat to look in her
father's face. She saw now who it was that she had rescued. Toyner
stirred a little when she touched him, and opened his eyes, the same
grave grey eyes with which he had looked at her when he bade her
good-bye. There was no fever in them, and, as it seemed to her, no lack
of sense and thought. Yet he only looked at her gravely, and then seemed
to sleep again.

The girl sprang upright upon the bank and wrung her hands together. It
came to her with sudden clearness what had been done. Had Toyner told
his tale, she could hardly have known it more clearly. Her father, had
tried to murder Bart; her father had tied him in his own place; it was
her father who had escaped alone with the boat. It was he himself, and
no apparition, who had peered in upon her through the window. She was
wrought up into a strong glow of indignation against the baseness that
would turn upon a deliverer, against the cruelty of the revenge taken.
No wonder that miserable father had not dared to enter her house again
or to seek further succour from her! All her pity, all the strength of
her generosity, went out to the man who had ventured so much on his
behalf and been betrayed. That unspoken