eon Cove," I added idly.

The breeze was rising, drawing sharp criss-cross furrows on the water,
and I noticed how it ruffled the woman's hair; her hair was like her
eyes, a warm red-brown.

"What is Sturgeon Cove?" she asked. "Is it a bay,--a larger one than
we have passed?"

I took a rough map from my wallet and handed it to her. "Much larger,
you see," I said. "It almost bisects the peninsula. Only the Sturgeon
portage, about a mile long, separates it from the lake of the Illinois.
We must be near it now."

She gave but a look at the map, then glanced at the cloud-streaked west
and at the shore.

"Try to make it. Try to reach Sturgeon Cove," she urged.

I was thinking of something else, so I answered her only by a shake of
the head. Perhaps that angered her. At all events she smote her palms
together with a short, soft little clap, such as I use when I call my
dog.

"I do not wish to land here," she said, throwing back her head at me
quite as she had done when I thought her a boy. "I wish to go on. Why
not?"

I motioned Pierre to the shore. "Because you would get wet," I
answered stoically.

She flushed as redly as if I had hurt her. "And if I did?" she cried.
"Better discomfort than this constant humiliation. Monsieur, I refuse
to be made a burden of in this fashion. It is not fair. You made your
plans to reach a certain point, and you would go on, rain or otherwise,
if it were not for me. For me, for me, for me! I am sick of the sound
of the words in my own brain. I am sick of the excuse. Each added
sacrifice you make for me weighs me like lead. It binds me. I cannot
endure the obligation. Believe me, monsieur."

I had no choice but to believe her. Yet she stopped with a gasp of the
breath, as if she had said too much, or perhaps too little,--as if she
were dissatisfied. Well, I had but scant desire to reply. I should
have liked to walk away, and rebelled in my heart at our forced
nearness in the canoe. My feeling was not new. When I had thought her
a man she had antagonized me in spite of my interest; as a maid she had
troubled me, and now as my wife I found that she had already power to
wound. Still, with all my inner heat, I could look as it were in a
mirror and understand her unhappiness and vexation. She was trying to
act towards me with a man's fairness and detachment, but each move that
I made showed that I considered her solely as a woman and therefore an
encumbranc